Football, Freedom, and Other Things Republicans Pretend to Understand

America gathered last night to watch men in armor chase an oddly shaped ball while commentators explained, with grave seriousness, that this was the purest expression of freedom on Earth. Meanwhile, the National Football League—an organization Republicans adore—continued operating as one of the most aggressively “socialist” institutions in the country, without anyone storming the field to protest redistribution.

This contradiction is not a bug; it is the lesson.

The Socialist NFL

The NFL is not a free market. It is a carefully regulated ecosystem designed to prevent the strong from eating the weak until only three billionaires remain and the rest of us are sold commemorative jerseys. There are rules. There are referees. There are penalties. There is revenue sharing so that teams in Green Bay can compete with teams in New York. There is a draft system that rewards failure with opportunity. There is a salary cap to prevent rich owners from buying championships the way tech moguls buy islands.

In other words, the NFL is “socialist” on purpose.

If the league operated under Republican economic theory, the Super Bowl would feature the same two teams every year, both owned by hedge funds, with an extra five players on the field because their owner paid a premium. When the poorer teams complained, they’d be told to “innovate harder” and stop being lazy. Helmets would be optional. Torn ACLs would be framed as market corrections.

Fans, understandably, would stop watching. Children would stop dreaming (my nephew, who has a Drake Maye jersey, included). Congress would hold emergency hearings within a week. And yet when this exact model is applied to the American economy, we are told it is natural, efficient, and ordained by the ghost of Adam Smith.

The NFL understands something America forgot after Reagan: markets are games. Games only work when rules prevent cheating. Without regulation, you don’t get competition—you get domination. Without referees, you don’t get merit—you get violence. Without redistribution, you don’t get balance—you get oligarchy.

The league pools its television revenue and divides it equally. No owner gets richer just because their city has more skyscrapers. This is called “revenue sharing,” but Fox News would call it Marxism-Communism if applied anywhere outside a stadium. The NFL also requires teams to spend a minimum amount on players. Owners are not allowed to hoard profits while underpaying labor. Imagine proposing that owners cannot hoard the riches to our members of Congress. A Republican would need medical attention, as our republican legislators would be having heart attacks.

Conservatives insist that billionaires are proof of a fair system, yet recoil at the idea of a billionaire-owned team winning every game forever. They love competition until it produces losers they recognize. They praise meritocracy until they realize merit requires a level playing field.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this. He knew that capitalism, left to its own devices, does not self-regulate—it metastasizes. Without guardrails, the biggest players rig the game, rewrite the rules, and call it freedom. That is not a market; it is feudalism with better branding.

Reaganomics promised prosperity through deregulation. What it delivered was consolidation, monopoly, and a middle class hollowed out so thoroughly it now requires two paychecks to approximate the life one paycheck once provided. Two-thirds of Americans were middle-class when Reagan took office. Today it’s closer to 45%. The rest were told this was efficiency.

The NFL did not regulate football because it hates competition. It regulated football so that competition could exist at all. America once did the same with capitalism—and it worked. Then we handed the rulebook to the owners, fired the referees, and told the players to be grateful. What we have now is a mess.

The choice before us is simple. We can keep pretending that letting billionaires write the rules and own the media is freedom, or we can remember what freedom actually looks like: a fair game, enforced rules, and the possibility that even the underdog might win.

Because when the rules only work for the owners, the rest of us aren’t players anymore. We’re just there to watch, pay, and lose—while someone else buys another yacht and calls it merit.

One More Note: Bad Bunny and Donald Trump

The full video of Bad Bunny’s entire performance has been viewed nearly 14 million times on YouTube as of 10 a.m. ET Monday. Early indications signal it may have been the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show of all time.

America is a pluralist society. This does not mean it is a fair society. However, if (if, if if) we can reduce what makes it unfair, then our society will be better. Trump’s version of America is to hate on the people who are different without realizing that we are all different.

His version of America is based on hate.

Trump The Hater

Donald Trump is certainly a hater. He actively demonstrates hatred, malice, or intense negativity toward others.