What is cheating?
A few recent news stories caused me to think about this. One was the accusation that pitchers in major league baseball are doctoring the ball with a sticky substance that makes their pitches faster and more elusive. The other was the report that the richest Americans paid little or no income taxes.
Are both of those things cheating? Is one of them? Neither?
First, the pitchers. All athletes do what they can to get an edge. In baseball, pitchers have been putting shit on the ball since before any baseball owners insisted that the taxpayers build them a stadium. It’s a safe bet that David put some shit on his slingshot before he aimed it at Goliath.
Of course, all of that is now against the rules. So, in that sense, the pitchers are cheating. However, there is a universal acknowledgement in baseball and other sports that you can do as much as you can get away with. (The exception is golf, the pure sport where all players police themselves and where any player who is caught breaking the rules becomes a pariah.)
In Little League they teach you that if you try to catch a ball but only trap it just after it hit the ground, you must pretend that you caught it in the air and try to get the ump to believe you. Catchers are applauded for being able to “frame” a pitch. “Framing” is catching a pitch that was close to being a strike and pulling it quickly into the strike zone, again to try to fool the ump. Why aren’t those two practices cheating? Has baseball ever banned them? Of course not.
Oh, you can say that sports are just games. Really? In those games, billions of dollars are invested in their outcomes.
And speaking of billions of dollars invested in outcomes where doing what you can get away with is also the watchword, that brings us to the billionaire taxpayers, or, more accurately, the non-taxpayers.
These people are so hell-bent not to pay taxes that they pay an army of accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists about as much, if not more, than they would have paid in taxes just to make sure that they don’t pay those taxes.
These non-taxpayers will tell you that they are only following the rules. Even if that is true, does it really mean that it’s not cheating? These are the same people whose wealth and power have given them the ability to influence what those rules are. The New York Times reports, for example, that the IRS rarely audits private equity behemoths who structure themselves into a myriad of partnerships. People earning less than $25,000 a year are at least three times more likely to be audited than are those partnerships. By one recent estimate by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the country loses $75 billion a year from investors in partnerships failing to accurately report their income. Why? Well, maybe because the private equity industry has “donated” nearly $600 million in campaign contributions over the last decade.
Could the private equity managers afford to chip in a little more for the good of the country? I’m just guessing that they could. My guess is based on the fact that, again according to the Times, the top five publicly traded firms last year paid their executives $8.3 billion.
If you played a game where the people you were playing against made up the rules to their benefit, wouldn’t that be cheating? And aren’t we playing against the billionaires in the game of taxes? What they don’t pay, we have to.
I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Sadly, though, so are ethics.
We were right 