David Brooks: Socialist

A lot of people do not read the Op-Ed page of the daily newspaper.  They just don't know what they're missing.  This morning David Brooks is back for his usual weekly appearance in the Picayune.  And he makes Oscar Wilde sound like a straight man for Jerry Lewis.

He's fretting over the current buzz to drop the pretense surrounding "amateur" college athletics, and just go ahead and pay these mostly make believe students a decent return for their rich entertainment value.  As it stands now, the schools, along with their front-man brokerage firm known as the NCAA, get almost all the loot, right down to the last accountable penny.  And it is in the teeming millions.  Meanwhile, the students athletes often get all the day-in day-out pain and suffering, long-term disabilities, and short circuited educational prospects.

Mr. Brooks concludes his piece questioning the method by which a pay scale might be established, and issuing this moral and cultural exhortation: "A competitive society requires a set of social institutions that restrain naked self-interest and shortsighted greed."  All this from a guy who regularly lauds the benefits of unrestrained "free-market" operations.  That is to say, no labor unions - let the market set the scale, and, of course, as little business regulation as existed sometime in the early 1900s. 

I have a suggestion for the Picayune, why not print Brooks' column in lots of colors, complete with hand-drawn pictures, so that more people would read and enjoy it like they do the Sunday comics?