Tackling the NFL

Tonight, the NFL game between the undefeated New England Patriots and the New York Giants, originally scheduled for national telecast only on the NFL Network, will be simulcast on CBS and NBC.

"We have taken this extraordinary step because it is in the best interest of our fans," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.

That's not quite the whole story.

The NFL has taken this extraordinary step because the United States government threatened to withdraw the league's antitrust exemption.

Last week, Senators Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent the NFL a threatening letter. The senators warned the NFL that if it didn't agree to a free national telecast of the Patriots-Giants game, they might introduce legislation to withdraw the NFL's exemption to the nation's antitrust laws.

The senators also had their staff members "talking with" league officials over the Christmas holiday to change their minds.

"After weeks of insisting they wouldn't cave in," AP sports writer Rachel Cohen reported on Wednesday, "NFL officials did just that."

You might remember that Major League Baseball's heavyweights showed up for a Capitol Hill dog-and-pony show on steroids after lawmakers made noises about withdrawing baseball's antitrust exemption.

What exactly is antitrust, and why is everyone so anxious to be exempt from it?

"The antitrust laws give the government the power to prosecute and convict any business concern in the country any time it chooses," Ayn Rand wrote in 1962. She described antitrust as "a haphazard accumulation of non-objective laws so vague, complex, contradictory and inconsistent that any business practice can now be construed as illegal, and by complying with one law a businessman opens himself to prosecution under several others."

The folks at Microsoft might agree with that.

Ayn Rand saw the antitrust laws as a means for the "random little powerlusters of the moment" to seize and hold control over somebody else's productive enterprises. "The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamed offenses, is a much more potent means of enslavement than explicit dictatorial laws," she wrote. "It demands more than mere obedience; it leaves men no policy save one: to please the authorities; to please--in any issue, matter, or circumstance, for fear of an unknowable, unprovable vengeance."

Tonight, the NFL will give away its product on two broadcast networks because the "random little powerlusters" of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee threatened to withdraw the league's exemption from the laws Ayn Rand described.

"I think it was a smart move on their part," Senator Patrick Leahy told the Associated Press.

Is this a problem for the rest of us, or is it just a football game?

It's a problem. It's an abuse of power.

The NFL is a privately-owned business, and it is being coerced by the U.S. government to give away a product which it was trying to sell to Time Warner and Comcast. The government has no authority to interfere in the league's negotiations with cable companies. There's no law that prevents a private business from packaging its product and selling it to the highest bidder.

But under laws that are "vague, complex, contradictory and inconsistent," the NFL has reason to fear prosecution for something that it's doing somewhere.

Under the antitrust laws, virtually any successful business can be prosecuted for doing something somewhere.

That's really handy for any politician who wants to raise money for his or her re-election campaign, political action committee, or national party campaign committees.

"He does not have to exercise his power too frequently or too openly," Ayn Rand wrote, "he merely has to have it and let his victims know that he has it; fear will do the rest."

"We're happy to accommodate the NFL's request for a joint national simulcast of this potentially historic game to make it available to the widest possible audience," said Dick Ebersol of NBC Universal, another company that wants to keep members of the Senate Judiciary Committee happy.

That's the best thing about an abuse of government power. Its victims are always happy to accommodate it. They're very, very happy to avoid the alternative.


Copyright 2007

Source note: Ayn Rand, "Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason"; The Objectivist Newsletter; February, 1962. Reprinted in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, available from Amazon.com, the Ayn Rand Institute's bookstore, and many other booksellers.

Editor's note: You might be interested in the 2005 post, "Barry Bonds' big asterisk."

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