Go Ahead, Strike--but Foot the Bill

The spectacle of greedy, overpaid ballplayers duking it out with kvetching billionaire owners while little kids and the country are deprived of the national pastime is distasteful enough.

But the external costs of the inability of these two immature parties to behave properly are more than distasteful. They demand that we create a new economic model on how we treat this and every other strike.

We do that by paying attention to the real, hard-dollar costs that selfish, striking employees or selfish, locking-out employers or immature, greedy bargaining parties cause other, innocent, parties.

In the baseball strike set for Aug. 30, the Labor Department and all of us should ask:

* How much will peanut vendors and parking lot attendants and hot dog and souvenir sellers on near-minimum wage lose? Let’s charge the striking parties for this.

* How much will the city-run and private parking lots or restaurants that rely on game traffic lose from fans not coming to games? Let’s charge the striking parties for this.

* How much will television networks, sporting goods companies and advertisers that have sponsored ballplayers or stadiums lose when “The Selfish Boys and Men of Summer” engage in their almost annual bickering? Let’s charge the striking parties for this as well.

So, let them fight. At this point, I couldn’t care less. But let’s make them pay for the privilege.

There is a cost to them striking, and peanut vendors are not the ones who should bear it.

If we truly factored in the external costs of this and every other strike, and made the parties pay for their actions, the simple economics would make the parties find a solution fast.

Why don’t we place the cost for strikes where it belongs? I call it “true cost factoring.”

No one wins in a strike. It is nothing more than a modern-day form of Stone Age bludgeoning. The goal, like boxing, is to inflict enough damage to make the other party fall to the floor in a bloody puddle or just give up.

It’s absurd.

There is a civilized alternative. An alternative, in fact, that the players and owners themselves use every year to settle individual salary disputes. It’s called binding arbitration.

Everyone gets to make his or her case, all of the facts and emotional arguments are heard and considered by trained, professional neutral parties, and a solution is reached.

The beauty of arbitration is that whenever parties can’t agree after a certain period, they simply submit their arguments to this neutral panel. No lockout, no fuss, no mess, no strike and, most important, no injuries to innocent parties (who really need the money).

So let’s insist that the players and owners arbitrate their differences or, if they are unwilling to do that, make them factor in the potentially enormous costs they cause the rest of us.