Comment by kortilla
13 hours ago
> If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union.
The burden is on anyone to make a claim in either direction because you don’t have a control. How do you know the salaries wouldn’t have increased just due to baseball popularity and demand for good players?
The salaries for top players would have increased, sure! But there’s no reason to think the minimums would have, and an obvious supporting point is that there have been several strikes that occurred during the contract negotiations
Also, we forget the price fixing scandal in big tech. Programmers should probably all be making over 1M+ (thorough there probably would be fewer jobs).
> How do you know the salaries wouldn’t have increased just due to baseball popularity and demand for good players?
For starters, baseball is not nearly as popular today as it has been in the past, but salaries have not decreased. But more fundamentally, we do have a demonstrative example of great outcomes for players with the union, whereas we don't have a counterfactual of what would play out. Since you're the one arguing that a different choice would have been better (or the same), it stands to reason that you should have to provide evidence, because in the absence of either side providing a compelling argument, the only data we have is "things sure worked out well for the players after they had a union".