In this particular case, the US govt isn't forcing anything. The governing body of professional basketball in the US is (the NBA - through it's lovely Article X rule).
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The NBA (the league itself) has been trying to change this; it's the player's union who is stopping it.
It's only an issue because the NBA created the problem (sorta like government eh?) That's my point.
I disagree, in the sense that you're defining the problem in an extremely narrow way. For some reason, people are completely willing to accept that the only way a basketball player should be capable of making money in the United States is if they're in the tiny, minute fraction of basketball players who are good enough to play in the NBA. And they accept that despite the fact that the actual market for basketball is much, much, much larger than the NBA. A billion dollars in non-NBA basketball revenue is generated every year.
You seem to be defining the problem as "how do we get another 3 to 5 eighteen year olds paid each year" -- for me, the problem is that there's a billion plus in revenue generated by a lot of labor each year. And a big chunk of that labor lacks access to that money.
We don't NEED leagues like this - even if they are free market solutions to a dumb problem - if the NBA would just do away with Article X and let people make decisions for themselves, including the kids who want to jump straight to the pros and the front office execs who just can't stop themselves from drafting the latest AAU all-star, then there wouldn't be a problem to begin with.
Again, this is only true if you define the problem very narrowly. There are far more basketball players who generate a whole lot of revenue than there are basketball players who earn money from that revenue. Luke Garza, for instance, is not an NBA player and likely won't stick in the league. And yet, he's a very high profile basketball player. If somebody like him wants to choose to play in this second league while going to college, and make 100k a year in the process, I have no problem with that. And that's not in any way solved by letting the NBA draft 18 year olds.
To be clear, I wouldn't invest a dime of my own money in an idea like this because I think the incumbent this league has to beat out (the NCAA) has about 8,000 built in advantages, but the market they're going after isn't NBA money. It's NCAA money.
[QUOTE=GraffZ06]
Letting 18 year old adults make their own adult decisions about their lives makes more sense to me than changing the definition of amateurism and trying to come up with some convoluted method of paying college players, or starting weird 8 team leagues, that doesn't cause the whole thing to crumble before our eyes. JMHO.