If You Buy It...
Jim Henley links approvingly to a Radley Balko column at Fox News suggesting that the new stadium being built in DC to house the Nationals (or the new football stadium in Indianapolis) be named "Taxpayers' Field:"
But time and again we’ve seen stadiums sell naming rights to corporate sponsors, essentially selling over a city’s cherished identity for a few more bucks in the public coffers. See the venerable Hoosier Dome’s conversion to the "RCA Dome," or Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium’s switch to "CINergy Field."
Just this once, why not recognize and show some appreciation for what will be each stadium's biggest contributor?
It's sort of surprising that Jim approves of this, because it's a very non-libertarian approach to the problem: hoping fervently that the government will, of its own good will, make a positive statement. Jim (and Radley, though I know less about his politics) is missing a golden opportunity to put his principles into action. Why wait and hope that the government does something good, when you could buy what you want?
ESPN provides a helpful table of naming rights data, indicating the per-year contract costs for various stadia. There are a few really astronomical values (why in hell is Phillips paying $9 million a year for naming rights to the arena where the Atlanta Hawks play? The Hawks, for God's sake...), but most of the big ones are in the $1-2 million range. Both of the places Radley cites by name are going for $1 million a year.
Now, that sounds like a lot of money, but as Howard Dean could tell you, all it would take to raise $1 million is to get 10,000 people to pony up a hundred bucks each. Surely it ought to be possible to find that many libertarian sports fans. You can probably even find 10,000 libertarians who aren't too cheap to cough up $100.
And if you were to shoot for a more reasonable naming goal, such as "Hoosier Dome" (in Indy) or "Veterans Memorial Stadium" (just about anywhere), the PR value of the attempt would probably let you get a lower rate for the name.
So don't sit around wishing and hoping that Anthony Williams will do the right thing-- go form a corporation, and start collecting donations. And if you can't get it together in time to buy the DC or Indy naming rights, according to ESPN, San Francisco's stadium deal expires in 2007, and you should have no trouble at all raising enough cash to buy back "Candlestick Park." I'd probably kick in a few bucks toward that one.
Posted at 10:01 PM | link | follow-ups |