Everywhere you cast your eyes in America today, competition seems to have disappeared—or has at best been sidelined. Sports, commerce, university admissions (and grading), politics. It’s gone or is on the way out.
Major League Baseball is the prime example of waning athletic competition. Every season, the big-market teams with the most money (mainly from TV) are consistently the ones with the best records. They can afford to buy the top talent when they hit the free agent market, leaving their small-city brethren far behind. The Yankees can sign a Juan Soto and the Dodgers a Shohei Ohtani without skipping a financial beat, showering these superstars with the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product of Pittsburgh. The system, in short, is rigged. No wonder MLB fandom and TV ratings have declined by a lot. Fortunately for fans, there is still a decent level of competition in the other major sports (although someone forgot to tell Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs!).
In recent years, it appears that every kid that plays any sport gets a participation trophy at season’s end. No one is allowed to “fail” (and perhaps profit from the experience). This delusional unreality then continues until adulthood (see the discussion of the disappearance of competition at the college level, below).
Capitalism at its most aspirational is supposed to be about unfettered competition. However, when you look around at what has happened, everywhere you look you see competition in decline. The antitrust laws are a joke, especially when applied (or not) to Big Tech. The competitive allocation of capital to companies has been overcome by the aggressive pursuit of fees by Wall Street investment banks, and private equity firms seeking a quick buck from stripping assets and people from their acquisitions. Business monopolies and oligopolies increasingly dominate across many industries.
Admissions statistics at the most highly selective post-secondary institutions impart the illusion of vigorous competition. The contest for one of the 2,156 winning tickets to Yale’s Class of 2028, for example, attracted 57,465 applications, mostly from high schoolers with dazzling GPAs and standardized test scores. What these numbers don’t reveal is the admittees who got a boost because a parent or grandparent happened to be Yalies, or because the family shared some meaningful portion of its bounty with Mother Yale as application season approached. The other seven Ivy League schools are comparable.
That is not where the university aversion to competition ends. Grade inflation is rampant (see Rant #789, “The Grade Inflation Distortion”). Everyone is an achiever. Failure is non-existent. Just like life, eh?
And then there is politics. Competition should be the bedrock of a democratic republic. However, political competition is now essentially a dead letter. Take the 2024 races for the House of Representatives, the supposed “People’s House,” where democracy was intended by the Constitution’s framers to come closest to its original purest ancient Greek meaning: rule of the people.
This year the people won’t get much of an opportunity to express their will. In 2024, there are fewer competitive House races than ever before in our history. Only about 25 of the 435 House seats up for grabs—or just over 5 percent—are in competitive districts. Thanks to gerrymandering taken to the level of a high art, the corruption with which it is applied blessed by the Supreme Court, 410 seats are considered safely in the pockets of either the Republican or Democratic Parties. In other words, no contest; no competition. The U.S. Senate and virtually every state legislature are only slightly more competitive. Thanks in large part to the distortion of the anachronistic Electoral College and its unfair winner-take-all practice which delivers all but four of its 539 possible votes, only about seven “battleground” states are likely to decide the presidential election. This system is rigged and the people suffer accordingly from mediocre representation.
Dick Hermann
June 22, 2024
Major League Baseball is the prime example of waning athletic competition. Every season, the big-market teams with the most money (mainly from TV) are consistently the ones with the best records. They can afford to buy the top talent when they hit the free agent market, leaving their small-city brethren far behind. The Yankees can sign a Juan Soto and the Dodgers a Shohei Ohtani without skipping a financial beat, showering these superstars with the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product of Pittsburgh. The system, in short, is rigged. No wonder MLB fandom and TV ratings have declined by a lot. Fortunately for fans, there is still a decent level of competition in the other major sports (although someone forgot to tell Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs!).
In recent years, it appears that every kid that plays any sport gets a participation trophy at season’s end. No one is allowed to “fail” (and perhaps profit from the experience). This delusional unreality then continues until adulthood (see the discussion of the disappearance of competition at the college level, below).
Capitalism at its most aspirational is supposed to be about unfettered competition. However, when you look around at what has happened, everywhere you look you see competition in decline. The antitrust laws are a joke, especially when applied (or not) to Big Tech. The competitive allocation of capital to companies has been overcome by the aggressive pursuit of fees by Wall Street investment banks, and private equity firms seeking a quick buck from stripping assets and people from their acquisitions. Business monopolies and oligopolies increasingly dominate across many industries.
Admissions statistics at the most highly selective post-secondary institutions impart the illusion of vigorous competition. The contest for one of the 2,156 winning tickets to Yale’s Class of 2028, for example, attracted 57,465 applications, mostly from high schoolers with dazzling GPAs and standardized test scores. What these numbers don’t reveal is the admittees who got a boost because a parent or grandparent happened to be Yalies, or because the family shared some meaningful portion of its bounty with Mother Yale as application season approached. The other seven Ivy League schools are comparable.
That is not where the university aversion to competition ends. Grade inflation is rampant (see Rant #789, “The Grade Inflation Distortion”). Everyone is an achiever. Failure is non-existent. Just like life, eh?
And then there is politics. Competition should be the bedrock of a democratic republic. However, political competition is now essentially a dead letter. Take the 2024 races for the House of Representatives, the supposed “People’s House,” where democracy was intended by the Constitution’s framers to come closest to its original purest ancient Greek meaning: rule of the people.
This year the people won’t get much of an opportunity to express their will. In 2024, there are fewer competitive House races than ever before in our history. Only about 25 of the 435 House seats up for grabs—or just over 5 percent—are in competitive districts. Thanks to gerrymandering taken to the level of a high art, the corruption with which it is applied blessed by the Supreme Court, 410 seats are considered safely in the pockets of either the Republican or Democratic Parties. In other words, no contest; no competition. The U.S. Senate and virtually every state legislature are only slightly more competitive. Thanks in large part to the distortion of the anachronistic Electoral College and its unfair winner-take-all practice which delivers all but four of its 539 possible votes, only about seven “battleground” states are likely to decide the presidential election. This system is rigged and the people suffer accordingly from mediocre representation.
Dick Hermann
June 22, 2024
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