Here the Senate President Pro Tem makes the case that the General Assembly mandating N.C. State and UNC-Chapel Hill play East Carolina in football grows the economy:

?There are no negatives to it,? Basnight said this week. ?It benefits the economy of Eastern North Carolina and benefits Raleigh. It fills up the stadiums. All I?ve heard in the legislative building this week is ?Big game, big game.? Why play some out-of-state team when you can create this much interest??

Let’s set aside for a moment (a) the greater foolishness of believing a college football game on one Saturday out of the year will have a measurable effect on the state’s overall economy and (b) the abject ridiculousness of state policymakers wasting time setting college football schedules, so we may focus instead on the opportunity costs of this particularly dotty approach to “helping the economy.” (Let’s not forget our our Hazlitt!)

Economic benefits, per Basnight:

  • It fills up the stadiums.

  • Legislators are really interested in it.

Economic costs, per Basnight:

  • There are no costs (“no negatives”).

Now, let’s look these over, one by one:

1. Stadiums. Of interest here would not be total ticket sales, but marginal ones ? i.e., how many more tickets would be sold for the ECU/NCSU or ECU/UNC games vs. games against other opponents by ECU and NCSU or UNC? Concessions revenue would also factor in here.

Nevertheless, these are in-state games of interest primarily to North Carolinians; whatever money they have available to spend for entertainment ? be it football, movies, or what-have-you ? that’s what they’re going to spend (i.e., if they spend more to watch football, that means they have less for the local cinema). In other words, the net economic effect of the games with respect to in-state spectators will be approximately zero.

OK, then what about out-of-state spectators? Fine; how many of the marginal ticket-buyers will be out-of-state residents? Well, relative to what? That’s a good question. What if, instead of hosting a nearby, local team, the home team for the legislatively mandated ECU game hosted an out-of-state opponent? Presumably, more of the marginal ticketholders would be out-of-staters. Even if we assume a lower overall sale of tickets (which isn’t a safe assumption at all, by the way), this scheduling would attract greater spending in the state by capturing some of the out-of-staters’ entertainment spending, not just on tickets and concessions, but also on hotel stays, restaurants, etc.

2. Interest among legislators. That’s all well and good, surely, but again, whatever economic effects are incurred by this factor are negated by the very fact that N.C. legislators already take money from North Carolinians, so even if their interest translates into greater spending on ECU, NCSU, and UNC, that money will just have been moved around (that is, if we choose not to consider the alternatve uses of those dollars).

What about others’ interest? We’ve already discussed the fans at the game; what about fans wanting to watch the game? Well, when it’s a local game with little outside interest, TV stations are going to have little incentive to televise those games because there would be few viewers and therefore few if any advertisers willing to underwrite the broadcast. That means that the universities won’t receive income from selling the rights of those games to broadcasters. The ECU/NCSU game this weekend wasn’t on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN-U, Fox Sports, ABC, NBC, nor even Jefferson-Pilot. Instead, it was pay-per-view, meaning viewers had to compensate their TV network for providing them a chance to see the game.

Other games matching ECU and NCSU against other, out-of-state opponents would have greater chances of being televised and bringing in more money to N.C.

3. There are no costs. There are always costs and benefits to anything; understanding that is the key to economic wisdom. Anyone who tells you there’s no cost to something is trying to trick you or has already been tricked.