Free Market Football

The Fabian Society has released the results of a survey that they commissioned on what British people considered a ‘reasonable’ wage for certain professions.

The YouGov run poll of three thousand people demonstrated that the public thought footballers’ and company directors’ salaries should be radically curbed while nurses and bus drivers deserved far greater financial rewards.

I think the survey’s findings do ring true. Many people in Britain are indeed resentful of those that earn much more than them – though arguably that is only natural human behaviour. However, I do wonder how many of those questioned in the survey go to watch football matches week-in, week-out and therefore provide the demand and ticket revenue that supply the footballer’s wages? Quite a few I would imagine.

The Fabian Society’s spokesman, Tom Hampson, said ‘Progressive politics should acknowledge that the public want the unfair gap between rich and poor narrowed’. In other words, the Fabian Society believes the Government should directly intervene even further into private sector wages to curb ‘excessive’ earnings.

This is, of course, just the Left-wing socialist equality agenda of old dressed up in the new Progressive agenda clothing - the Progressive agenda being the supposedly forward-looking, always improving doctrine of modern politics rather than anyone not agreeing with that world-view who must instead be a backwards looking ‘regressive’.

As it is at the moment, Britain does not operate under a particularly free market system in many respects. Public sector state employment in Britain accounts for over 20% (or 1 in 5) of the total UK workforce. Additionally, many private companies such as IBM rely massively on expensive government contracts such as ID Cards or the new NHS computer system.

The local hospital or state service will usually be the largest employer in any area, bringing with it enormous financial and often potentially political clout. With increasing levels of Government red-tape and excessive regulations, the market is often quite limited in some of its business options.

While the latest Government figures would suggest that Public sector employment has actually decreased slightly since 2005, this is not especially true. What has actually happened now is that the Government have become wise to the potential media and public relations advantages of the situation.

The Government appear to have decreased the numbers of employees working and being paid directly by the state by a few thousand. This means that they can publicly claim they are cutting state dependency and thus saving the taxpayer money by removing ‘unnecessary bureaucratic jobs’. However, at the same time they have increased the number of staff taken on from private employment agencies. This is really quite a clever bookkeeping trick, since the agency employee appears as a ‘resource’ rather than an actual employee.

All systems of resource allocation have their inherent advantages and disadvantages. However, when allowed to function without too many constraints, the free market has consistently proven itself to be the forerunner above all other competitors.

While this may mean intellectual idiots such as footballers receive higher wages than those of nurses and scientists; in a free market, as the Assyrian writer Publius Syrus once observed, ‘Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it’, and that is the fairest method in my opinion.

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