A Cato Institute study, “Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for D.C. Baseball,” got a lot of attention in the nation’s capital and seems to have sunk the hopes (of some) for a subsidized baseball stadium in D.C. and saved the good taxpayers a bundle. The City Council insisted that there had to be private funding to match taxpayer funding and that seems to have sunk the whole deal. The Mayor’s reactions to the Cato study were revealing.
Hooray for the Cato Institute. Many gov’t projects irritate me. But few are as grating as these stadium construction projects. They are just pure wealth transfers from one set of private citizens, to multi-millionaire baseball franchise owners. What a scam. Thank you, Cato Institute.
More revealing was the local sports media reaction, which demonstrated open contempt not only for Cato, but for the idea of free markets in general. Thom Loverro of the Washington Times and virtually the entire Washington Post sports department engaged in the most boorish behavior towards the Cato study (and every other valid criticism of the stadium plan.)
Alas it will come to no avail. Other powers will assure that there will be a short lived baseball team in the Nations Capital if for no other reason than the Congress would like a team to visit when they get bored with taxing us to death.
Reason has triumphed for a while, but emotion will win the day, I predict.
Cato Institute got it right, but so what?
Well, for a relatively small investment of money and time, we may have saved the taxpayers either the whole thing (hundreds of millions) or at least some portion of what otherwise would have been expended from the public purse. So it was either a big victory or a small one.