I used to have a reoccurring conversation with a friend in college about equality. He is a libertarian and argues for minimal interference and rules. I am not. He would talk about the level playing field between he and minorities, including women. He argued that they had the same chances he had. I pointed out that he is 6’4 and gigantic. He has a deep, booming voice and is incredibly imposing. I would watch shy young women of 5’3 make no attempt to engage him in class, because he was forceful and physically dominant. He also used (perhaps unintentionally) his size to his advantage. Between a big man and a small woman, there is no level playing field, when the playing field is a social/academic one.
Of course, these women had their own advantages, but these require overcoming the advantage his aggressive style gives him. He gets a head start when he walks in the room because the natural inclination of everyone else is to cede to his aggressiveness. Even a defensive or counter-aggressive posture means the interaction plays out on his terms.
I was reminded of this when I listened to a story about a new tobacco bill this morning on Michigan Public Radio. This new bill, like bills popping up in Washington and Virginia sponsored by the tobacco industry, targets small tobacco shops for a tax increase based on the big business playing field.
The foundational argument is simple enough: if you produce cigarettes, you should be subject to the state’s per/pack tax. This sounds fair and balanced. Until you focus on how different these operations are. The big cigarette companies produce their product on a massive scale, with streamlined distribution systems creating a low-cost product cheaply, efficiently, and nationally. The independent tobacco shop allows customers to hand-roll the cigarettes or use a machine to roll the local product they purchase with some efficiency. No mass production, national profit stream, or infrastructure investment that produces cheap goods quickly. This playing field is only level for big business, because it is their field and their business model.
The idea of the level playing field only works when controlled for nearly all major differences. The Detroit Lions compete against the Green Bay Packers under the same rules, cost structure, and relative resource pool. This means that the differences are minor: coaching, style, talent evaluation, draft success, injury prevention, conditioning, etc. We wouldn’t put my hometown Alpena Wildcats up against the Lions and expect them to compete. Their differences are major: high school students, smaller talent pool, financial resources, etc. To speak of a level playing field in such broad terms and with such ideological rigidity is to believe that it is sufficient to have the Wildcats compete against the Lions at Ford Field in Detroit. In the most technical sense possible, the Wildcats have a literal chance of winning, but no conceivable chance of winning short of miraculous intervention. We couldn’t beat Traverse City!
The problem with the conversation is that we speak about this as if the only variable is the playing field. If we keep it level, the grass trimmed, and the lines painted, we will have a fair contest. But we ignore all of the ways in which, even the most neutral of sites doesn’t make a contest fair.
Perhaps the problem is that we even see it as a direct contest. What the big tobacco companies do is mass produce cigarettes to the masses. The small tobacco shops are local businesses catering to a niche market and innovating their craft product to their local community, the very stuff of our politicians’ rhetorical support. Why change the competitive environment for purely ideological reasons when the end result will be an actual decrease in the type of competition we cherish?
[NOTE: Please do not read this as an endorsement of smoking. It is not. I do not smoke and am no friend to the tobacco industry. This seemed like the perfect example of not only ideological hypocrisy, but a confusion of priorities.]
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