My favorite open-minded progressive wrote something very progressive indeed in yesterday's column about whether athletes who play for American univerisities should get paid:

Surely if one considers only star players such a Durant, the NCAA is indeed benefiting from a free-labor system. But is that the way we should look at matters?

During Durant's college season, 2006-07, there were 343 Division I men's basketball teams, each awarding 13 full scholarships, and 270 Division II basketball teams, each awarding 10 full scholarships, for a total of 7,159 men's basketball scholarships. (The numbers are now slightly different.) The following season, Durant's rookie year, there were 55 NBA players who had just left college, either early or as seniors. Since 55 from that college season advanced to the NBA, we can roughly judge that 55 of the 7,159 major-program basketball players that year were being exploited financially, while the other 7,104 were not. The other 7,104 players were coming out way ahead financially, as they were receiving free college educations -- if they had enough sense to go to class -- plus experiences that might help them in later life, especially in the business world. ("Wow, you played basketball at Boston College?")

He actually made $4.3 million in his college season -- it's just that the money was donated to others.Divide 7,159 by 55, and get 130. So each player from Durant's college season who might have been earning an NBA salary was supporting the college educations of another 130 players. This is the key thought missing from free-labor complaints about college basketball. Yes, the tiny fraction of players capable of advancing to the NBA do perform for far less than their market price, but they create economic value that lets large numbers of others go to college on scholarship.

The thinking behind that argument is downright scary, but typical of the ways open-minded progressives justify forcing weird totalitarian policies on others. It basically can be summed up as: it's all right to steal value from people who are probably going to be rich anyway, giving them only crumbs (university courses they neither need nor want), if the money they generate is spent to give other people something most of them neither need nor want, as long as it's something that progressives value such as education.

Progressives especially love to heavily tax athletes because they like to think that athletes are overpaid - in other words, they believe they know what the "real" value of the athlete's performance is better than the team the athlete works for. The whole thing is a great example of the sort of idealism that I'm glad ran out of money and gave up running my part of the world 20 years ago - we know what's good for you better than you do and we feel good about forcibly taking that money from you to pay for it for other people, too, and while we're at it we'll pay some bureaucrats for administration and enforcement.

I suppose conservatives can be just as conceited and creepy but at least they tend to use their own money when they want to influence the way sports teams are run.

When it comes to the actual issue at hand, I don't like the way American high schools and universities act as de facto lower tier leagues for the NBA and NFL shrouded in amateur student-athlete idealism. I don't much care for idealism, and I don't care at all for enforced amateur status.