Upgraded from Minimum Wage

It looks as though the New York Knickerbockers will not match the three-year offer that the Houston Rockets recently extended to Jeremy Lin.  This allows the restricted free agent to move to a state without an income tax and to collect $25 million over the next three years.

In a previous post in March, I noted the fact that Mr. Lin, a Harvard alumnus who is presumably smart enough not to squander his new wealth like so many athletes, was at the time making the NBA's paltry league minimum for his tenure, $800,000 per annum:

Lin's "minimum wage," given an 82 game season, is $9,756 per game, which itself is 48 minutes.  So that is equivalent to $12,195.12/hour for game time (assuming Lin plays the entire game, which he doesn't).  By contrast, the current regular minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25/hour.

For the next two years, Mr. Lin will make $5,000,000 per year, which by the same metric as above comes to $76,219.51 per hour.  In the third year of his contract, Mr. Lin will earn $25,000,000, which translates into $228,658.54 per hour.  The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 per hour.

The Knicks might have balked at that $25 million over three years amount in the end, although according to a July 5th Tweet by ESPN's Marc Stein:  "Source with knowledge of Knicks' thinking: 'They will match any offer on Lin up to 1 billion dollars.'"  One billion dollars ended up being too much, I suppose -- not that too many people would have actually cared.  Only the Knicks seem to care about $30 million, and that because it does not want to pay a tax for exceeding the league's salary cap.

The point I made in my prior post still stands, only more so now.  It is that temporary tent-dwellers will raise a hue and cry over, for instance, Jamie Dimon's base salary of $1.5 million as CEO of J.P. Morgan in 2011.  Curiously, that happens to be less than twice that of Mr. Lin's NBA approved minimum wage last season and, what is more vivid, less than Mr. Lin's new $5 million salary for the coming season.

Masses in Zuccotti Park might raise pitchforks in protest of Mr. Dimon's total compensation in 2011 of $23 million, a vast sum, but a sum still less than the $25 million that Mr. Lin will report to the IRS in three years.  To my knowledge, there are no protests over Mr. Lin's package.

Let's be honest.  Mr. Dimon's job is more demanding than Mr. Lin's.

The former's company employs in Manhattan alone more people than the entire NBA employs worldwide.  And this comparison is still true even if you don't count the NBA layoffs last year, which were 11% of its workforce.  One can argue that Mr. Dimon does not deserve his lofty pay package for steering a financial institution that is systemically important to the global world order.  But one might also argue that Mr. Lin does not deserve his similarly lofty package for the game-time intervals of pleasure that he provides to New York and now to Houston basketball fans.  (Of course, the Wilt Chamberlain example in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia comes to mind; see pages 160-64.)

Maybe Mr. Lin relieves through his job the stress that Mr. Dimon creates in us through his.  We worry about the financial system, our money, and what might happen if the system breaks down.  We do not worry about the collapse of the NBA in the same way, and watching Mr. Lin juke a defender or drop a trey helps us to forget about the risks associated with the banking sector that will funnel to Mr. Lin his $60,976 per game next season.

Be that as it may, the real question in my mind still is this:  Why is a large compensation package in one industry (finance) more fundamentally objectionable than that in another (sports and entertainment)?  Why is the one protested and the other not?

And what does the fact that one is protested and the other not say about the basic nature of what is being protested?  And about the protesters?

I suppose we should all be happy that Mr. Lin has finally broken free from the enslaving shackles of his minimum wage.