An appreciate hat tip to Michael Munger at DivisionofLabour.com for this beautiful example of what I call Cordato‘s Law, which can be summarized as: You can’t use reductio ad absurdum argument to refute leftists, because they can dream up more absurd things than you ? and probably already have.
“Bertell Ollman is a professor in the Department of Politics at NYU,” reads the bio at the bottom of the page. The author is one of those academic Marxists, having “published over a dozen books on Marxist theory and socialism, the most recent of which is Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method.” Prof. Ollman is unhappy with the game of basketball for the “model of how society works and ? implicitly and often explicitly ? how to get ahead in such a society” that it provides.
“Games, of course, receive a lot of help in socializing young people to systematically misunderstand their society,” Ollman writes (emphasis added), “from schools, churches, families, media, government and market exchanges, but only games are able to use the pleasure they generate to hide what it is they teach.” For this reason, Ollman wants to rewrite the rules of basketball in the Marxist’s view of how society works. Not doing so, he writes, “marks an ideological surrender of monumental proportions.” (Aside: What kind of monument?)
So here is what he proposes:
First, I would charge an admission fee not only to watch the game but to play in it. … Second, there should be a price paid for each shot taken, and the easier the shot, the more it should cost. … Third, as for fouls, one should be able to pay the referees, so that they never call any fouls on you … . Fourth … the team that pays more [should] have its basket lowered, and for double that amount to have the basket the other team is going for raised.
Under present rules, those players who are taller and better coordinated and can run faster and jump higher have all the advantages. My rules would exchange the advantages enjoyed by these people for other advantages that would benefit a different group, one that has been poorly served by basketball as now played. That group is the rich. With my rules, the rich would possess all the “talent” (what it takes to win) and ? more in keeping with what occurs in the rest of society ? never lose a game.
