The Wilt Chamberlain Argument in 2019

I was listening to Vox's The Weeds podcast this week -- as has become a commuting ritual for me this year -- and they brought up Robert Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain argument for libertarianism in the context of contemporary debates about taxation. (They also mentioned similar lines of thinking advanced by Greg Mankiw in more recent times.)

The argument was familiar to me in paraphrase (you know how it goes: people want to go see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball; he has a special and rare skill that people will pay good money to watch him perform; should he not, therefore, keep all of this money that is paid to him for this skill?; is it not in fact iniquitous and morally abhorrent for the state to take some of it away in the form of taxes or in the name of distributive justice? Etc.), but I had not given it more than a moment's thought in the last few years.

I had never found the argument -- or any other that has been advanced for libertarianism -- particularly persuasive. But hearing it summarized in 2019 -- after an act of dissent initiated by Colin Kaepernick three years ago led other NFL players to decide to take a knee during the national anthem, and prompted Trump to respond with his infamous dog-whistling calls to eject them from the field/league -- I regard it in a different aspect. What interests me now more than anything is the fact that Nozick chose Chamberlain for his example.

Obviously, the extreme libertarian argument that wealthy people should pay no money whatsoever in income tax to support public services would be a great deal less sympathetic if Nozick had chosen to illustrate it through a hypothetical Yuppie earning income on a trust fund, say, or a white CEO who had been tapped for Skull and Bones (even though the same bland logic could be made to apply in both cases: people want to buy the temporary use of the capital in the Yuppie's fund and are therefore willing to pay the interest that ultimately generates his or her income, at some remove; so too, presumably someone's buying whatever goods and services the CEO's firm has to offer).

Instead, Nozick chose to explain his theory through the example of a popular Black athlete. Why? Because sports-as-metaphor-for-true-meritocracy is one of the deepest and most cherished myths in our collective psyche. In sports, the idea goes, anyone can get ahead, regardless of their background. Sports is a laboratory for an American racial democracy that never has been. A place where all that matters is talent, pluck, tenacity, "heart" (as the coaches in sports movies always say), etc.

Nozick's presumptive American readership will intuitively sense in Wilt Chamberlain's example the positive side of capitalism. Here's someone making it through their own skill and determination, not through prior advantage. Of course he should be allowed to keep the proceeds he earns! Nozick must be right!

Of course his argument bears no relation to the actual economics of professional sports. (And perhaps he would employ the philosopher's dodge at this point of saying it was just a thought experiment, but he plainly chose to use a real person's name in his example for a reason.) People didn't pay Wilt Chamberlain to watch his games, they paid a sports franchise that employed him.

Moreover, the primary reason that some significant and generous share of that sports franchise's profits was returned to Chamberlain in the form of a salary was not because of the pure functioning of the market mechanism. It was because most pro sports leagues by that time -- including the NBA -- were unionized. Their players, like other workers, enjoyed collective bargaining rights under federal labor law, and used them.

The NBA had been unionized since the late '50s, and indeed-- at the time Nozick's book was published, the association was engaged in a multi-year contract litigation with the players. Prior to this era of organizing among professional athletes, they were generally paid abysmally low wages with no benefits -- even if they were among the most famous players of their time.

It's thanks to the National Labor Relations Act, then -- not unfettered capitalism -- that Wilt Chamberlain was compensated at a high level. Nozick's notion of professional sports as a haven for the unregulated market is a fantasy.

Nevertheless, sports still tend to be regarded -- at least by many white Americans -- as the last untainted sanctuary of pure merit, fair competition, and racial equality. It is partly for this reason that the 2016 national anthem protests were so disturbing to many people, and why Trump found in them such a convenient target for his usual rhetorical violence and sadism.

Among those who attempted to articulate this feeling in less vile language than Trump, it usually took the form of resentment at the notion that "politics" had now apparently invaded the previously non-ideological realm of football. Prior to this eruption of anti-racist protest, the argument goes, football was something that "everyone" could come together around. Now it too had become politicized and polarized.

There is an interesting and uncomfortable moment in a documentary I saw recently that speaks to this point. Part of Amazon's All or Nothing series, it follows the 2017 season of the Dallas Cowboys. It was during this season that Trump's rhetorical attacks on Kaepernick and other players started forcing most teams in the NFL to respond in one way or another, to choose a side.

It would seem that the Cowboys' approach was one calculated to satisfy no one. They, including the team owner and head coach, walked onto the field and kneeled together before the anthem played. Then they stood with hand on heart while it was actually being sung. Meaning... what, exactly? Almost nothing, because such is the destiny of most such attempted compromises.

This is not the uncomfortable moment I had in mind, however. Rather, that comes during a backroom conversation among the coaches. They are a majority white group -- strikingly so, given that the team they coach is made up primarily of Black players. The white coaches in the room -- the only ones who speak during this scene -- all agree that they would much rather "just play football" and are pained that they have to spend any time one way or the other thinking about either the anthem protests or Trump's incendiary response.

As one of the white coaches puts it: "[For] those three hours, let's play football. And then, every hour after that, use your platform, fight for change, do whatever you want. But those three hours, let's preserve what football has been, which is the ultimate melting pot, where you earn respect for who you are, what kind of teammate you are and how you play."

What's fascinating in this statement is of course that the coach's critique of people allegedly bringing politics into football is immediately followed up by the statement of a political ideology. Football is presented as a microcosm of an ideal meritocracy. Once again, we have the legendary form of American capitalism intruding. Sports as metaphor for market.

What Kaepernick did with his choice to take a knee was plainly not to introduce ideology or politics for the first time into football. Ideology was there all along.

Rather, what he did was to give voice to a different set of ideas from the one reigning at the helm. Into the Arcadian grove of American market mythology, where all that matters is grit and determination, he brought a reminder that our society is in fact riven by injustice, inequality, and racism.

Kaepernick was protesting against an ideology of pro sports that allows the success of a chosen few to serve as an ideological excuse for the impoverishment, incarceration, and denial of basic human rights of many. His act of dissent highlighted the hypocrisy of a society that worships a small number of Black athletes without abandoning or questioning its own racism -- the same double-dealing that Basquiat implicitly skewered in his drawing, "Famous Negro Athletes," and which has been a major theme of many a Spike Lee dialogue.

It is also the ideology that Nozick relied upon in the 1970s to impart a false patina of democratic cheer and egalitarianism to a belief system (libertarianism) that in fact is rather viciously Darwinian.

Brian Barry said it best, in his notoriously scathing review of Nozick's work. (If you have any of my personality traits and political prejudices, I promise you Barry's review may be the most fun you ever have over three pages of academic prose.) As he put it in 1975, Nozick's approach betrays: "a sort of cuteness that would be wearing in a graduate student and seems to me quite indecent in someone who, from the lofty heights of a professorial chair, is proposing to starve or humiliate ten percent or so of his fellow citizens[.]" Enough said.