Why is That?

The article ‘No Outrage Over Foreign Invasion‘, raises the issue of why there is such protest over black teenagers going into the NBA draft, but no protests over the European teens going pro. The same question could be asked about why nobody cares when white tennis players, golfers, or baseball players turn pro straight out of high school. I can only see one difference in these situations — the color of their skin. In my opinion, anyone that can come out of high school and make millions has every right to do so. In fact, you may be a fool not to turn pro in that situation. Why risk a career-ending injury in college if you’re already capable of making millions in the pro ranks? I can’t see a good reason.

But back to the reason for the protests… I think that most people can’t stand the idea of these (black) kids becoming instant millionaires straight out of high school. To them, something surely must be wrong with society if these kids can get paid like that for doing ‘nothing’. Well, to those people I say our capitalist system is working as designed. Take LeBron James for example. Many will complain about his $90 million Nike contract. But do they consider how much money he will generate? LeBron will likely single handedly revive the economy around Cleveland’s arena. And if he’s anywhere close to being the next Michael Jordan, that means billions of dollars in revenue to the NBA. And there’s no doubt that he’ll generate millions in ticket sales for Cleveland’s road games too. Oh, and the shoes… you know Nike is gonna sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of LeBron James gear. (Jordan generated over $153 in revenue for Nike in his first year with them.) So why can’t LeBron get his cut? If he had developed a Windows killing operating system nobody would have a problem with him getting paid. Many of those same people will whine about athlete’s salaries in general, yet they won’t complain about the money the team owners are making off of those same athletes. Now why is that?