If the sheep are going to be sheared anyway, is it wrong to sell spectator seats . . . ?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Comes news today that we are that much closer to two new Food Stamps allocations to Major League Baseball. The count so far this year is three Welfare-addicted baseball teams moving into two brand new, taxpayer-funded stadia. If you read nothing but the Arizona Republic, you would never know that professional ath-a-letes and their empressariat make quite a bit of money. Cancel your subscription for three months and you might actually get the addle-pated idea that they can afford to pay for their own damn ballparks.

Not here.

Our public schools provide free breakfast and lunch all Summer long in even the wealthiest of suburbs, and the municipalities of Greater Phoenix have never once met an ath-a-lete who didn’t need a multi-million dollar hand-out. The quality of mercy is not strained.

Fine. Stipulated. This is the way things are, and they’re not going to change anytime soon. Metropolitan Phoenix grew faster than any American city by not emulating the dumb stunts by which other cites manage to lose population, but those days are done. We are still not as stupid as the cities celebrated by the celebrated Richard Florida — cities attractive only to people who don’t have children — but we inch our way ever more Floridaward with every election. Again: Fine.

My conundrum is that, as much as I hate these silly stunts, they turn out to be very good for my clients. Any rational economist is only too happy to point out that, in the long run, subsidizing the lesser producers of wealth at the expense of greater producers is suicidal — and who can walk the Floridian Utopias Back East without fearing that the collapse might come at any instant? We might spit in spite of John Maynard Keynes, who famously said, “In the long run, we are all dead” — but, alas, it’s true. In the long run, the policies that Phoenix is pursuing will result in the same civic, economic, cultural and demographic disasters we witness in the cities now feeding our population growth.

But real estate is a medium run investment.

We have a new football stadium on the west side, and a new hockey stadium. Today we are promised a new baseball stadium. The town of Avondale is building a new town center, as is the town of Goodyear — with another new baseball stadium nearby. And I have been stuffing my clients — owner-occupants and investors — into these neighborhoods for years. The net global economic consequences will be negative, especially long term. The specific near run and medium run consequences for those particular homes will be very positive. In essence, the taxpayers aren’t just subsidizing the teams and the monument-building aspirations of megalomaniacal politicians — they are also subsidizing my clients.

I am not without interior conflicts about this, but it remains that my job is to do what is best for my clients, not for the taxpayers — who volunteer for their shearing at every election, anyway. No one would be benefitted by my steering my clients away from these boondoggles. No crime would be averted.

And — to think — I know where the unannounced freeways are going to go, where the malls will have to be built, where key landholders are themselves waiting for the taxpayers to come and freely fertilize their investments. I’ve been a Realtor for coming on six years, but I have been enraptured by this real estate market for nearly twenty years. I can tell my clients where to put their money, house-by-house, for decades to come.

Yes, I am selling spectator seats to the sheep-shearing. There really is nothing morally wrong in this, but it’s a nice illustration of how a mixed-economy corrupts everything. A significant factor in my calculations of when and where to advise my clients to invest their money comes from a cold-blooded confidence in the venality of politicians and the gullibility of voters. I can show you where to make money — but for the sake of this Phoenix I love so much, especially the Phoenix of the ever-neglected long run — I wish it were a harder job to do…

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