It’s not difficult to see a line of connection between the baseball owners in 1994 complaining about “economic uncertainty” and the various one-percenters* of the business community making the same complaint today. Both were after the same thing: a guarantee that they would continue to make ever more money, irrespective of how bad they were at managing what they owned. Bankers who took a huge federal bailout and then insist that regulation is the greatest threat to economic growth sound suspiciously like small-market owners who shelled out ridiculous contracts only to demand salary caps and revenue sharing.
Really, it’s PJ O’Rourke’s “whiffle life” again: the belief of the upper class that they should enjoy perpetual immunity from the consequences of their actions. Must be nice.
* In years gone by, motorcycle enthusiasts insisted that they were perfectly respectable people and that the “outlaw biker” thug image represented maybe one percent of bikers. Which in turn led certain biker gangs to start wearing a patch that merely said “1%”. So if you ever wander into a bar and see a lot of those patches, I hope you wore your steel-toes, because you’re in for a rough night…