The problem here is that you put a lot of emphasis on the way in which the free market works. The way in which it allocates funding, etc. The problem that I'm trying to ensure that you see is that full-on capitalism has a strong tendency for the money to bunch up in places. If we worked purely on the value presented by competition, we'd have races to the bottom, and races to the top. We have things like minimum wage laws and tax brackets to help manage this. Capitalism, without regulation, is doomed to fall apart. Again, for every dollar you give to that baseball players, that's a dollar you take away from someone else. For that dollar increase in wage, you have added 0.0001% value to the million-dollar-a-year baseball player, whereas you have added 0.005% to the 20k a year (minimum wage, 40 hr/wk 52 wks/yr brings in, before taxes, 15.08k) person's value. In regards to proportions, it's absurd. That baseball player at that amount also only takes home around 50 cents for every extra dollar, whereas the 20k a year worker will get to take home at least 80 cents of it, further increasing the separation. And yet, if we took out the minimum wage regulation, the free market would only want to increase this disparity.

The entire point of this is that the free market needs regulation to keep efficiency going and to give a larger percentage of the populace spending power, which is another form of voting, mind you. The bottom of the rung jobs are what ultimately make it possible to have the absurd payscales that we commonly associate with CEOs and athletes. Forcing these employers to spend more money on their low level employees isn't going to affect the top end in any more ways except their take-home earnings. All employers would be forced to do it, so they'd all take the same cut to their top end, and the competition suffers just the same. For every 20% cut one team must take, the other teams must take as the regulation laws are universal.

So, what I'm trying to sum up here in detail for you is that the only reason we can pay these people these high wages, is because they're profiting so absurdly from the bottom because of our relatively low minimum wage laws. Low Minimum Wage = High Player Salaries. The market does not provide proper value to these people and proper value must be regulated through extra laws, such as our minimum wage law and tax laws. The invisible hand, for all intents and purposes, is mentally handicapped.

You know what? I was thinking about it, and let's just skip all this process and get to what we all really want, bringing back slavery.

I see the error of my ways. Maybe you're right. In fact, the minimum wage law itself is absurd. As you said, anyone can sell hotdogs. We should just drop minimum wage and let hotdog sellers compete for the lowest payright! Maybe we can even get them down to 2 dollars an hour. It'll be great for the economy!

As a bonus, this would provide the owners with that much extra cash to pay players with. You might be onto something, we could show baseball players their true value by letting everyone compete for their wages! Bottom of the barrel be damned! Regulation was a stupid idea to begin with.

Isn't that the whole argument for why we should keep a free market? It's supposed to fairly distribute pay based on the value that the service brings to society. Invisible hand and everything. All it makes me see is that we should probably implement a few more of Socialism's ideas.

Think of how many underpaid workers it takes for these things to happen that are trying to support others. To keep the stadiums going and to keep the shows running to continue pulling in a profit for everyone that's making absurd amounts of money off this. If it were efficient, the distribution of income would more appropriately reflect the value gained by society. Companies are able to make lots of profit off of those with low income, leaving more room to pay these million dollar salaries to players. Classism sure is awesome.

It's a Ford.

Baseball players don't provide millions of dollars of benefit to society, though. The free market is pretty inefficient at times.

Ah, yeah. But I swear, this looks like something from an intro to some old cheesy show.

Leftover frosting? I think I want to lick the frosting that was used. ;D