Paul Ryan, Green Bay Packer Fan

Paul Ryan, Green Bay Packer Fan

Elliott J. Gorn: Paul Ryan, Green Bay Packer Fan

It has finally cooled off a bit here in the Midwest, signaling that football season is once again upon us. So consider, all of you football fans, how much better the Green Bay Packers would be if the team was privately owned. What if a Mark Cuban or a Jerry Reinsdorf bought the team and ran it as a real business? Not convinced? Neither are Packer fans.

The Green Bay Packers go all the way back to the original National Football League, and they alone among NFL teams have a nonprofit ownership structure. Tens of thousands of people own shares, but these are unlike regular stocks; they are not traded, they don?t fluctuate in value, they don?t confer any special privileges, and no one is allowed to own anywhere near a controlling interest in the team. Hundreds of thousands of shares are out there, so the fans effectively own the Packers, and they hire whom they want to run the team. It is what our old friend Ayn Rand would call ?collectivism,? kin to socialism.

You?d think this would offend Packers fans, those good solid Midwestern folk. But no, quite the contrary: Green Bay supporters are among the most loyal in all of professional sports, loyal because they feel a deep identity with their team. Their team. Don?t these benighted, socialist cheese-heads know that the spirit of free enterprise builds winners, that the profit motive is the high road to success? Apparently not. The team?s thirteen league championships are the most in NFL history, with Super Bowl victories in 1967, 1968, 1997, and 2011.

And more, the fans understand that the first thing any right-thinking capitalist who acquired the team would do is threaten to move out of tiny Green Bay and its beloved Lambeau Field. The Packers are already successful, even thriving? All the better to squeeze the locals for profit, get some tax abatement, blackmail them into building a glitzy new stadium with more skyboxes and sushi bars for the 1 percent, drive up the price of tickets, generate more revenue, then sell the team for a fortune. Or if some other town offers a better deal, just back up the trucks in the middle of the night and leave Wisconsin behind.

As we head toward the November election, will some intrepid reporter please ask the boy genius ?conservative intellectual? Paul Ryan if he is a Green Bay Packers fan? Ask if he grew up rooting for the Pack, if he went to their games as a child, if he comes from an old Packers family?children, parents, and grandparents all living and dying each Sunday in fall with the yellow and green? Has he ever done photo ops with team members, does he occasionally don a Packers jersey, hang a pennant in his office? Does he bond with his constituents over Vince and Brett and Aaron?

Then ask the congressman if he thinks the team wouldn?t be better off if it was owned privately, if some cable billionaire?some ?job creator??bought the Pack and operated it for profit? Since private enterprise is always best, since nothing is as efficient as free markets, since all things ?collectivist? are to be shunned, wouldn?t Wisconsin be better served by drowning in a bathtub, so to speak, this last vestige of public ownership in sports?

If Ryan dared to suggest that the Pack ought to be privately owned, he?d never win another election in Wisconsin, and he knows it. But if you?re one of those subversives who think that other teams should be structured like the Packers, forget about it. Fearing a threat to their cartel, the NFL decreed decades ago under Commissioner Pete Rozelle that no ball club in the future would have more than thirty-two partners, and that at least one of them must own 30 percent of the team. Capitalism might be a game for manly men, but only if they get to make the rules and tilt the table.

Photo: Brandon Johnson, formerly of the Packers, does the Lambeau Leap (Elvis Kennedy, 2010, via Flickr creative commons)