Smallholder hereby calls for a law declaring it to be illegal for municipalities to construct ballparks for the primary purpose of housing public teams.

This is a perfect example of a good use of the interstate commerce clause (unlike the atrocious stretching of the Constitutional elastic underway in Ashcroft v. Raich). Ballparks [Ballclubs - ML], a private enterprise, threaten to move out of state in order to force concessions from local governing bodies.

It has to stop.

Baseball does NOT need the subsidies. Players command huge salaries on the basis that they ought to share the wealth that their team generates. If a team paying for its own stadium would force economy on the payroll, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for a guy making eight million annually to play a game being forced to take a 50% pay cut.

Let’s do the math. Say a stadium costs $300 million. A team finances it at 10%. So $30 million a year of the team’s revenue will go to debt service. So player salaries fall by a portion of that amount and the team owner pays the rest out of other revenue streams.

The law has to be national. If a state or locality enacted such a law, other cities would be more than happy to poach teams.

Green Bay has it right. Let the fans own the team. There was no blackmail when Lambeau needed to be updated.

UPDATE FROM YOUR MAXIMUM LEADER: Alas, the Smallholder’s attempt to be the Peyton Manning of bloggers appears to have petered out… And his great exertions of the day seem to have affected his memories. While your Maximum Leader full agrees that professional sports franchises do extort money from localities; he must say that Congress need not get involved in stadium financing issues. And your Maximum Leader must also point out that Lambeau Field improvments were jointly financed by both the Packers and Brown County, Wisconsin. Not solely by the team.

UPDATE: Thanks for the correction, Mike. My faulty memory told me that the stadium was paid for by selling more stock - the same stock issue that allowed you and Vater Smallholder to become shareholders. I stand corrected.