The Auburn University football team lost every game in 1950. In his book Braggin’ Rights, a game-by-game recounting of the Alabama-Auburn football rivalry, Bill Cromartie describes how “Alabama fans laughed, poked fun at, and cracked jokes about Auburn.” In 1955, the Auburn Tigers exacted revenge by defeating the Alabama Crimson Tide 26-0, resulting in the Crimson Tide’s own winless season. Auburn fans were jubilant, and they rejoiced in their opponents’ pain.
In a conflict-ridden world, your success is their failure, and vice versa. In a world plagued with the zero-sum fallacy, there is only one possible conclusion: whatever they have, they must have taken.
It has always puzzled me about collegiate football. The NFL is a zero-sum game in general: if you’re the Cincinnati Bengals vying for the AFC Central crown, you naturally want the Browns, Ravens, and Steelers to lose every week since their losses equal your gains. It’s a little more tricky with college football, though, because the reward structure is so strongly based on impressions. The College Football Playoff is an invitational event, so strength of schedule is important.
No one was truly campaigning for the Liberty Flames to be included in the four-team CFP in 2023, despite the fact that they won all of their games and played a lesser schedule than other Power Five conference teams.
According to a number of college football fans, every Saturday has the potential for two wonderful outcomes:
Our squad wins.
Our bitter adversary loses.
A little good-natured poking at your neighbor for flying the other flag can be entertaining, but it doesn’t make much sense if you want to win championships. A more sensible approach would be:
Our squad wins.
Any outcome that helps our team appear better.
That entails rooting for the adversaries. Alabama advanced to the 2023 College Football Playoff with a dominating win over Georgia that was not as close as the score showed. If Georgia hadn’t won 29 straight games and back-to-back national titles, Alabama would have been passed over. Indeed, one of the key arguments against Alabama’s inclusion was that they required a last-second miracle play to defeat an Auburn team that had been absolutely destroyed on their home field by New Mexico State — a terrific team, but one Auburn had paid $1.8 million to serve as a punching bag.
So, what does this have to do with political economy, and specifically the forthcoming presidential election? More than you could imagine. So much political rhetoric is about making the bad guys suffer, even if it harms those who despise them. The folks who purchased “Billionaire Tears” coffee cups and tumblers from Elizabeth Warren’s website in 2020 did not appear to understand that this is not a zero-sum game.
Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Bill Gates, and countless others earned billionaires not by stealing from others, but by offering them with things and services they valued at rates they were willing to pay. It’s horrifying to think they should endure.
College football fanaticism is a microcosm of the political economy’s problems. It demonstrates that people are willing to pay a price to make their adversaries suffer. This is all well and dandy in something innocent like college sports — better that it happens on the fictitious battlefields of college football than on actual battlefields — but it is positively harmful in a society where we rejoice in others’ agony.
Nobody is destitute because Jeff Bezos is wealthy. Unlike crowned rulers and royal families, Jeff Bezos made his money by founding what is widely regarded as the greatest retailer ever: Amazon. Consuming his money, which includes a large amount of Amazon stock, may temporarily pay redistribution programs, but it depletes society’s stock of valued productive assets, lowering everyone’s standard of living in the long run. In his article “Taxation as Social Justice,” Michael Munger mentions a song by Ten Years After that includes the lyrics “Tax the rich/feed the poor/’til there are no rich any more.” He observes that it remains “’til there are no poor no more.”
Consuming Jeff Bezos’ capital out of spite and hamstringing Amazon may not be such a huge concern if you’re generally well and financially secure, and you can maybe miss the latest iPhone. It’s a lot more significant if you’re counting coins in the grocery store checkout line to see if you can afford to buy that last can of soup. The “billionaire tears” mug is humorous, but it causes a lot of collateral harm. It is one thing to be willing to lose a championship in order to injure your competitors in sports. Accepting lower living conditions for everyone in order to harm your political opponents is a whole different story.
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