Why you should care about steroids and baseball

When scandal happened, the Romans would ask "cui bono?" - roughly meaning "who benefitted?" Lenin asked generally of capitalism "kto-kovo?" (who-whom?) meaning, who is the subject and who is the object?

One response to the steroid scandal is to punish the players for "cheating." The Republican or conservative view would be to view this issue as exclusively one of moral choice by players who deserve to be punished for knowingly making a bad choice. While the players deserve opprobrium for their actions, it is a huge mistake to insist that this is merely a matter of personal moral choice. Cicero and Lenin would disagree. The players' union protected the players, and management knowingly rewarded steroid users for pumping up statistics and attendance with pumped up salaries. Indeed, some may have outright encouraged steroid use for underperfomers. The players were also responding to market forces. So were the unions and the management, also. Marx commented in "Capital" that in capitalism it happens that people frequently make moral choices they would prefer not to make and say that they were forced into it by the market. Money, he said, becomes the subject, and we become its objects. How many bosses have cut wages or laid off employees with tears in their eyes, saying the market required it?

To put turn the steroid issue entirely into a moral lesson on individual responsibility not only misses the operation of the market system in baseball, but takes away our ability to fix the problem. As RBR can tell you better than I can, trying to prevent a person from purusing her own self interest with penalties alone is largely a doomed enterprise. Where everyone is responding to market forces, the blame and corrective efforts must also be applied strongly to those who are best able to resist market forces. Put another way, those who are motivated by economic survival and greed (players and their union) are harder to deter than those motivated by greed alone (the management). Those who knowingly tolerated steroid and HGH use should be punished as much as the players who used them. They need to be given an incentive NOT to reward the players for their steroid use.

We saw the same thing with Enron and other corporate scandals. Individuals were blamed, not the system that incentivized their behavior. Sarbanes-Oxley did not do enough to put the onus on the beneficiaries (the CEOs) to obey the law. Instead, individual corporate attorneys and accountants are again asked to risk their careers to challenge accounting practices. Auditors and accountants are punished for looking the other way, although if they had not done so, they would have been replaced by those who really had the economic power to make better choices. Conservative rhetoric about individual responsibility makes it harder to fix problems by putting all of the enforcement at the feet of those with the most perverse incentive structure.

Conservative republicans may say that I am advocating evading invidual moral responsibility, and that this is a religious issue. They see the Christian religion as preaching only about individual sinners repenting. But that is not the only valid interpetation. Jesus railed against the Pharisees in part because they created a religious and political system that made it much harder for ordinary people to make the right choices. His anger was not only at their sinfulness, but the heavy yoke they laid upon the poor. Individual responsibility should not be used to evade corporate responsibility.

I suspect this conservative individual-first rhetoric is cynically designed to prevent real change. Illegal immigration is blamed entirely on illegal immigrants, and "fixes" are addressed to punishing them, not removing the incentives that bring them here (jobs). Republican businessmen agitate against illegal immigration, but resist legislation aimed at employers that might actually work to stop immigration because want an underpaid illegal underclass. Or, as I like to say when angry, conservatism itself with its praise of self-interest is just an elaborate justification for the wealthy to keep their wallets closed.

The other conservative tack is to say "well, we're all to blame. " The fans are responsible for the baseball scandal. People who buy cheap products knowing they are produced by illegal immigrants are to blame. We must resist this rhetoric also. Collective action problems make it impossible for the general public to have an effect on these bad behaviors, even if they do bear some moral culpability for cheering and looking the other way (I myself once argued vainly that steroids were unlikely to be prevalent in baseball because the sport was more about skill than strength). Blaming everyone is a way of blaming nobody.

A regulatory scheme simply cannot be directed solely at those with the greatest moral responsibility; it must be addressed to those whose incentives can be best realigned. Because the wealthiest and most powerful are the most able to resist market forces (since they are motivated by greed rather than surival), this means that the center-left must vote to realign the incentives of the rich and powerful.