12/10/2004

More Letters in NY Post Respond to Op-ed on Steroids and Baseball.

The New York Post has several more letters responding to the op-ed that Sonya Jones and I had earlier in the week.

Well, people feel pretty strongly about this issue. Again one of the letters brings up in a very general way the point that I have heard over the week: if some players use steroids, everyone else will also be forced to use them and that you may only have a few who are really willing to use them. It doesn't really seem to me that there is a free-riding problem here because the league and the union internalize the costs and benefits. If the net benefits to the fan from this higher quality play exceeds the costs imposed on the players, the league has an incentive to let players use the drugs. If not, they won't. The responses to the other letters seem straightforward. I am not sure why we don't recognize that people make informed decisions about risk every day or that in all sorts of ways people take risks to improve performance in life. Football injuries are just one example. Do we really need to have the government regulate everything?

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