Brett Favre Makes It Official: Sports are Only a Business

Looking for a hero for your kids? How about yourself?

Looking for a great charitable cause? United Way, Goodwill, your local food pantry, your local school district.

Looking for something to cheer? A high school football team, a cheerful grocery store checkout person, a doctor who saved your child's life?

Looking for new clothing? Goodwill, a t-shirt you designed for your family reunion, a United Way t-shirt that says "I gave to my Community".

Whether all the pundits, the sports fans, the celebrity followers, the sometimes football fans want to admit it or not, the Minnesota Vikings' signing of Brett Favre was like the final nail in the coffin of folks who believed there are heroes still left in pro sports.

Pro sports consist of team owners who enjoy special monopoly laws endorsed and enforced by the U.S. congress. Pro sports team owners and players don't give a crap about who wins the championship this year: they just want to get paid.

No pro athlete or team owner (except publicly owned teams) cares about you. As long as the team and athletes are raking in the money, they wish you would go away: they want to live in their gated communities, buy shoes and cars, and spend more on jewelry in one day than you make in a year.

Most pro athletes hate fans. After all, you might recognize them on the golf course, or in the grocery store, or at a team facility, and ask them for the dreaded autograph or an opinion on the team. Just because they make more than the president of the United States and play in publicly-funded stadiums or reach their locker rooms via publicly-funded infrastructure, or played at your publicly-funded university in preparation for their million-dollar pro careers is no reason to think they should deign to speak with you.

Brett Favre needed to do what his family needed for perhaps another pair of shoes or a new refrigerator: he went to yet another team willing to pay him $25 million. His new team, the Minnesota Vikings, is hoping to parlay Favre's play into $700 million in taxpayer funding for a new stadium.

Favre's old team, the Green Bay Packers, got taxpayer funding for stadium renovation. (The difference between the Packers and Vikings must be noted, however: the Vikings are a private, for-profit corporation; the Packers are not.)

Favre is not to blame here. He is just a mercenary: a pawn for far richer men. He'll play if you pay. But isn't that what we all do? You bought all those things at discount stores who outsourced all the manufacturing and jobs to other countries just to save a few dollars. You paid but, of course, fewer U.S. citizens can play because there aren't as many jobs as there used to be. If a country whose economy is based on buying things doesn't make anything, how long does that last?

Favre is just like you: he goes where the money is.

Of course, in Favre's situation, his profession is covered by special U.S. anti-trust and monopoly laws which include very prohibitive employee laws. In your case, tough luck: Congress allows your manufacturing or service job to be outsourced. While Congress will honor and protect the restrictive employee laws for major sports teams, they don't care about the sports fan. Your jobs and profession are not protected.

Good luck trying to find health coverage and job protection like Congressmen get.

The Favre situation is a microcosm of life in the United States: if you work in a profession specially protected by Congress, you will thrive. If not, it's time to eat your young or at least feed them your Favre jersey.

Looking for a hero? Probably outsourced: after all, the U.S. only buys and pays for things. We don't really manufacture anything anymore, including heroes.