We're against the idea of salary caps

We have entire think tanks - the High Pay Centre for example - dedicated to the idea that some people earn, or are paid, too much. Thus, perhaps, there should be limits, salary caps, on how much people may earn. We are against this, yea even in association football:

Tony Bloom, the Brighton & Hove Albion chairman, suggested that it may be necessary to introduce a salary cap for top-flight players as a depressing picture started to emerge yesterday of the financial predicament Premier League clubs are in.

The reason for our opposition is that this is a distinctly pro-capitalist move.

Bloom, while seeing the problems with introducing a salary cap, was not averse to the idea. “If it’s going to work, it needs to be worldwide — certainly Europe-wide — and I see big difficulties with that,” he said.

“But something, I think, does need to change. Otherwise, salaries, player salaries, will always increase far too much and it becomes unaffordable for clubs. Certainly, I think something like that will be talked about. I see it being very difficult to come to fruition, though.”

Markets work best when they’re allowed to work. An outcome of this being that the money flows to whoever has the scarce resource. Being able to play professional sport at the top level is a scarce talent - certainly more scarce than the possession of a ground to play it upon, the ability to design and or buy a strip or the possession of a brand name. Thus all and more of the money in sport flows through to the players, none to a negative amount sticks to the hands of the capitalists.

We’re entirely happy about this.

It’s notable that American sports teams are generally profitable. They are also all a cartel - there’s no promotion up or down into and out of the professional leagues, making the team itself the scarce item - and have strict salary caps. It is these two things that limit the portion of the overall cashflow heading toward players and thus make them profitable. European sports near all have that promotion up and down. In association football a club can move from only just above amateur to the very top rank in mere years as both Rangers and the old Wimbledon and now again the new one have shown.

This does mean that we’re against UEFA’s financial fair play rules as well, which are a lighter version of the same restriction upon player incomes.

This is all most apparent in sports, where the scarcity of the talent is most obviously pronounced. But it is the same in any arena where salaries are restricted - it’s all a manner of increasing the incomes of the capitalists.

We should point out that we’re entirely happy with capitalists earning, just as we are with labour however talented or not. It’s just that to us financial fair play means the outcome achieved by a free market, not a set of rules designed to favour one side or the other. And the truth is that salary caps, as with other earnings restrictions, favour the capitalists, not labour. Our opposition is to the thumb on the scale, not the measurement itself.