Shawn Sharp

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

The moral argument is actually the simple one: nobody earns a billion dollars. You can be brilliant and work eighty-hour weeks for fifty years and you won't produce a billion dollars of value with your own hands. A billion is what happens when thousands of workers, public infrastructure, and network effects get funneled upward to one name on the cap table. The labor theory people and the market people can fight about the details, but the scale isn't "earned" in any sense the word normally means. What worries me more is what the money buys after it's made. Billionaires don't just have yachts. They have private leverage over the rules themselves. Look at lobbying spending in any cycle ([OpenSecrets](https://www.opensecrets.org/)) and ask who can afford a permanent seat at the table. One person with ten billion dollars has more political gravity than a million organized voters, and that breaks the basic premise of one person, one vote. Extreme wealth concentration is a slow-motion transfer of sovereignty.

Should college athletes be classified as employees with salaries and benefits?

Employee status sounds simple until you administer it. Are athletes employees of the university, the conference, or the NCAA? Who pays unemployment insurance when a senior graduates? Do transfer portal moves trigger labor disputes? What happens to international athletes whose visas forbid employment? The Dartmouth vote applied to one Ivy League basketball team; scaling that ruling to 500,000 athletes across 1,100 schools with different state labor laws is a compliance nightmare. Workers' comp alone would be staggering in football. And collective bargaining at public universities runs into state laws that vary wildly, some banning public-employee strikes entirely. The [House settlement's](https://www.ncaa.org/) revenue-sharing model already delivers pay without detonating the legal framework. Employee classification promises fairness and delivers a decade of lawsuits.

I am skeptical of the crime numbers. Crime correlates with temperature, foot traffic, and a dozen other things that change with the seasons. Attributing drops to the clock specifically feels like advocacy dressed as research.

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