You mean there already is a Weekend at Bernie’s II?? Wow. That really seemed like a one-movie joke. Doesn’t seem like you could return to that well too many times before it went dry. And by “went dry” I mean “started smelling really bad.”

Anyhow, it seems like that these two assholes are big fans of the Bernie films, since when Robert Young came home one night to find his roommate dead, his first thought was to go find his buddy Mark Rubinson and then take the body out for a night on the town. The two apparently carted the dead man all over town, running up his bar bill at a local dive and then using his ATM card at a strip club. Then they dumped the body back at the house and tipped off a passing cop that they thought maybe there might be a dead guy in that house over yonder.

So now they sit in a Denver jail, charged with identity theft, criminal impersonation, and something called “abusing a corpse.” That does not sound good. These guys are going to have trouble finding a job in the future. Just think about having to answer the inevitable “have you ever been arrested?” question with “Yes, for abusing a corpse.”   Abusing a corpse!

Nobody on earth will hire them.

The answer, as always, turns out to be “…it’s complicated.”

Major League Baseball has a system in place where teams “share” a portion of their revenue with each other (hence the term “revenue sharing” used to describe this system.) In effect, every team pays a 31% tax on all local revenues (ticket sales, local TV deals, etc.) into a pool of funds that is then divided equally among the several teams. This has the effect of the richer teams subsidizing the poorer teams, since although each team pays an equal percentage into the pot and gets an equal share of the pie in the end, differences in income cause the rich teams to pay far more than they get back, and poor teams to receive far more than they put in. If you don’t immediately see how this is so, imagine that MLB consists of only two teams:  The New York Evil Empires and the Kansas City Poor Bastards.  The Empires bring in $100 million a year in revenue, and thus pay $31 million into the shared pool.  The KC Poor Bastards bring in only $1 million in revenue, and thus pay $310,000 into the pool. The two teams then split the $31,310,000 equally between the two of them, with each team getting $15,655,000.  It doesn’t take a math whiz to see who just made out on that deal. On top of this, MLB also takes all revenue from league-wide sources (national TV contracts, for instance) and splits this money unequally among the several teams, with the poorer teams getting a bigger chunk than the richer ones.  So this means whenever the Yankees play the Red Sox on Fox, or the Cubs play the Cardinals on ESPN, the people taking home the most money from that are the Rays and the Pirates.

This system is in place to foster competitive balance.  The theory is that it’s better for everybody involved when all the teams have a chance to compete.  More markets being involved in playoff races means more potential revenue sources (aka fans) being interested in the baseball season for longer periods of time. If 30% of the teams are out of the race by Memorial Day, those fans will drift away and spend less money going to games and watch fewer games on TV. So, in order to get more fans interested more often, the rich teams subsidize the poor teams so those teams can spend more money on better players, (or build better, more attractive stadiums, or hire better scouts to find more good players, or whatever else it takes to create a baseball team people want to watch) win more games, and make baseball better overall.

Some teams have in fact figured out ways to win baseball games consistently with far less money than the big boys have. However, the Law of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head, as an equal number of teams have figured out that they can make more money from losing than they can from winning. The Pirates in particular have discovered they can consistently make more money being the worst team in baseball than they can expect to make if they actually try to compete. It turns out that as you try to lift yourself out of baseball poverty, the system acts to keep you in your place. Much like a poor family who finds that welfare pays better and is easier than trying to make more money, the Pirates have discovered that it would likely cost them more money to win more games and compete than they would make back in increased revenue, once you figure in the loss of baseball welfare they would suffer in the process.

So the simple answer to what MLB has to say about socialism is that baseball socialism leads to bullshit nobody likes (well, nobody except the owners of poor teams, I guess) much like real world socialism. The Law of Unintended Consequences always ends up biting you in the ass when you try to engineer a system to get people to do what you want, and it almost always ends up with a lot of people discovering the system in fact does exactly the opposite of what it was intended to do.

Ah, but therein lies the rub. The assumption is that baseball’s version of “sharing the wealth” was created in order to lift poor teams out of the poverty of losing and into the middle class of winning 85 games and almost making the playoffs every few years. But what if that’s not the point of the system at all?  What if the real point of the system is to keep labor costs down? Mr Joe Sheehan argues that the real point of baseball’s revenue sharing is to keep player salaries down by lowering the amount of expected revenue a team will generate per dollar spent on players. He gives the following example:

“For instance, if signing Cliff Lee this winter will make a team six wins better, and those wins produce $4 million in revenue each, Lee is worth $24 million a season to that team, a figure that shapes an offer to him. When a team has to pay 31 percent of that revenue into a pool from which it may get back nothing, then Lee is worth just a bit more than $16 million per season to them, and that figure will shape the offer. This is the goal of baseball’s revenue-sharing plan: to lower the return on player investments for individual teams in a way that keeps them from offering high salaries to top players, therefore tamping down salaries across the board.”

This is undeniably true. Well, except for the part where the team gets “nothing” back from the shared pool.  All teams get something from that pool, as I understand it.  But nonetheless, it is true, as I pointed out before, that the richer teams pay more into the pool than they get back, and poor teams get back more than they pay in, so this doesn’t change that his argument is basically spot on.  Taking away part of the revenue Cliff Lee generates makes Cliff Lee less valuable to his employer when it comes time to negotiate his salary.

Mr Sheehan then goes off on some crazy argument about how baseball should ignore actual revenue and instead look at some mythical “potential” revenue in order to gin up a revenue sharing system that “works.” It’s pretty crazy stuff, go ahead and check it out if you want.  Nonetheless, his main argument would appear to be unassailable.  If in fact the true intent of the revenue sharing system is to suppress wages, then it appears to be working well!  And in fact, the more money you take from the Yankees, the less incentive they have to pay their players more (or hire more expensive players to begin with.)  Similarly, the more money you give to the Pirates for doing nothing, the less incentive they have to pay their players more or hire more expensive players.  If you’re good, why try to be exceptional if doing so costs you more in salaries and luxury taxes than it generates in net revenues?  Similarly, if you’re awful, why aspire to be merely bad or even mediocre if doing so takes more welfare money out of your pocket than the increased revenue would put in?

So in this instance, what does MLB have to say about socialism?  Well, it would appear to indicate that the real point of the “sharing the wealth” part of socialism is to keep the wages of the working class down. Man, that sucks even worse than the first conclusion, doesn’t it? So the lessons we can take from MLB revenue sharing is either that “it does exactly the opposite of what it was intended to do, and that sucks” or “it does exactly what it was intended to do, and that sucks worse.”

Man. Better just stop right here.  This is surely the path to madness!

Using the blatantly unconstitutional practice of asset forfeiture, the US government has apparently been going around stealing guitars and guitar woods. Apparently, if you own a guitar that may possibly be made, whole or in part, out of the wrong sort of wood, the fish cops can show up and take it from you whenever they feel like.

The US Fish and Wildlife service recently raided guitar maker Gibson (for the second time) because it was feared they may be using wood from the wrong sorts of forests. Or something. I’m rather unclear on what makes the wood illegal, but it has something to do with being from “unsustainable sources.” Now, call me naive, but we’re talking about trees here, right? Isn’t wood the ultimate renewable resource?

Anyhow, Johnny Law says you can’t use that wood, so any guitar even suspected of being made from that sort of wood is subject to forfeiture. And here’s the real killer. Team USA can take your property without you having committed a crime, without convicting or even charging you with a crime, and without any proof whatsoever that your property is, in fact, made out of these mysteriously unlawful materials. In fact, once they take your stuff, the burden of proof is on you to show that your property is not in fact illegal. Bizarrely, the government will charge your property with the crime of existing, apparently. The wood taken from Gibson in the first raid a few years ago is still being held by the fish cops, and is currently standing trial in the case of “United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms.” I only wish I were making this shit up. The government can decide to take your stuff because it suspects it was the proceeds of or “involved in” some criminal activity, then not even charge you with a crime–and they’re not under any obligation to give you your shit back unless and until you can prove you didn’t commit the crimes they didn’t charge you with.

Seriously, fuck asset forfeiture.

The insanity just never ends with this one. Michael Andes of Shelton, Connecticut phoned in his own parking violation. It seems Mr Andes was super upset about his distinct lack of parking tickets, so he deliberately parked in a handicap zone and reported himself to the cops. This is the first bit of insanity. Mr Andes was apparently trying to prove a point, that point being “I LOVE ME SOME RULES!” Seriously, what kind of person is so worried about the lack of swift and harsh reprisals for parking rules violators that they’ll actually break those rules themselves and report themselves to the cops to prove a point? Answer: People who are Lawful Neutral. In non-geek terms, people who simply love rules and the blind enforcement of rules and care nothing for the rightness or wrongness of said rules or their punishments. We here in the real world like to call them busybodies.

But hey, maybe you tend towards Lawful Neutral yourself, or you’re some other kind of Lawful and at least can sympathize with the urge to see rules made and enforced “properly.” Well, the story gets better (or, actually, worse.) Mr Andes called the cops multiple times in the course of his crusade against his own illegal parking, and finally they showed up and tased the shit out of him.

That’s right! For the crime of calling them to report a crime, Mr Andes got his ass tased by Shelton’s finest. Police say he got “combative” and “screamed” at officers, so clearly they had to shoot electricity through his body. Note they didn’t say he actually attacked any officers or bystanders, nor did he even touch anybody it seems. No, he just yelled at them a bunch. He was charged with breach of peace (I’m going to guess that means “yelling in public,”) interfering with an officer, and of course was given that all important parking ticket.

I have a hard time sympathizing with anybody in this story. I think everybody involved acted irrationally at all times. It’s like some kind of bizarro world situation, with a guy who likes getting parking tickets and cops who don’t want to write them. It hurts my head.