Is there too much professional sports?

[hfojvt]

39. and what is so great about an economy?

Consider jobs. Let's say 100% of working age adults work 2,000 hours a year to buy the things we want and need. Say, for simplicity that there are 1,000 people. That is then 2,000,000 person hours of work. Let's say that 20% of that is "wasted" on sports. or 400,000 person hours. Taken them out of the economy, and suddenly "oh noes, we have lost a bunch of jobs because people are no longer wasting their money on our crap"

That's how it works in the real world.

But theoretically, if our economic system was designed better - say by separating wants and needs.

In THAT case, then losing 400,000 person hours of labor would be a GOOD thing. It would mean "less work" for all of us working saps. Now, we can get the things we want and need by working only 1,600 hours a year. Basically TEN weeks of PAID vacation. Who among us loves our job so much that we would not want 10 more weeks of paid vacation? I sure don't.

One of the reasons I have to work so hard is because of the demands of other people. My plumber will not fix my toilet for less than $50 an hour. Why so much? Maybe because he wants to buy season tickets. My dentist won't fix my cavities for less than $100 a pop. Why so much? So he can take a trip to Disneyworld. Or buy new lawn furniture.

Our system is designed so that everybody is incentivized to grab as much as they can - to squeeze that out of the public. That means that some people, many people get squeezed out. They end up homeless or despairingly poor because they were not as good at grabbing as Joe the Plumber. It's a lousy system, and I can still remember being young and foolish enough to think it could be changed.