Blumenthal worries about golf while the country falls apart

By Chris Powell

With Connecticut and the country falling apart, with the federal government spending billions of dollars to wage a proxy war in Ukraine and Russia, and with the next president likely to be a senile grifter or an insane one, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is worried … about golf.

That is, the senator is outraged by the merger of the PGA Tour with LIV Golf, the latter being the creation of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Blumenthal is leading outcry against it, and while the merger indeed would monopolize professional golf internationally, golf has nothing to do with the decline of economic competition that most threatens the country and the world.

Banking, insurance, agribusiness, airlines, health care, pharmaceuticals, broadcasting — you name it — nearly every industry in the United States is more concentrated than it was a few decades ago. In Connecticut nearly every month produces another acquisition of a local bank by a regional one. As employers get bigger and fewer, labor is disadvantaged. Concentration of industry is not the only cause of the decline of real wages in the United States, but it is a big one.

The Biden administration has pledged more enforcement of antitrust law but hasn’t produced much, though almost any enforcement would be an improvement over the administration’s recent predecessors. Some elected officials in Connecticut, notably Attorney General William Tong,  strike poses against bank combinations but his office defers to the federal government, leaving state antitrust law on the shelf. 

Of course in recent years government itself has gotten much bigger too and for the most part it does not make the economy more competitive. Instead it increases costs for business and labor alike.

In light of the worsening but unaddressed concentration in major industries, where most prices are set, it’s silly to get upset about professional golf, which employs few people and whose customers are less numerous and charged less than those of other sports, like baseball and football, whose industries long have enjoyed exemptions from antitrust law, whose ticket prices have exploded, and whose athletes are paid far more than golfers.

*

Besides, Senator Blumenthal’s opposition to LIV Golf’s combination with the PGA Tour seems less based on antitrust concerns than political ones — Saudi Arabia’s medieval and theocratic form of government, which the senator denounces. But Saudi Arabia is no more totalitarian than the government of China, which poses a far greater threat to the world and has much more business connection with the United States. In recent decades much of U.S. industry has relocated to China with little complaint and less action from Congress.

Despite Saudi Arabia’s totalitarianism, for a half century the United States has been in a de-facto military and economic alliance with the country, wherein the Saudis priced their crucial worldwide oil exports in U.S. dollars and held their surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds, sustaining the dollar as the world reserve currency when it came off the gold standard, and the United States agreed to police the oil shipping lanes. Just the other day the United States dispatched more jet fighters for that purpose.

* 

The billions of dollars Saudi Arabia now is ready to spend on something as trivial as golf are the product of that alliance. So should the Saudis be prevented from spending as they choose the dollars they earned by selling oil to the United States and its allies? 

A few months ago President Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia to beg for more oil production even as the president had pledged to shut down his own country’s conventional energy industry. Senator Blumenthal is a member of the president’s party and that irony escapes him.

The Saudi government lately seems to be having doubts about its U.S. alliance, and as the world oil supply has tightened, the Biden administration has been draining the country’s strategic oil reserve. If, as Senator Blumenthal suggests, Saudi Arabia is so awful that even a golf connection is objectionable, then an oil connection is objectionable too and he should become an advocate for increasing U.S. production of conventional energy.

—–

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-