Oh, look. The professional windbags of the Potomac have finally found a cause worth their collective, performative outrage. Not the crumbling infrastructure, the runaway national debt, or the slow-motion collapse of the middle class, but the existential threat of a nineteen-year-old quarterback making more money than a mid-level bureaucrat. A bipartisan group of lawmakers—a phrase that usually signals a rare alignment of corporate interests or a shared desire to ruin something functional—has decided that the college sports 'financial free-for-all' must be brought to heel. It is truly touching to see the Left and the Right join hands in the pursuit of keeping young athletes in a state of dignified poverty while the institutions they serve continue to function as tax-exempt luxury resorts with occasional classrooms.

The problem, according to these bastions of integrity, is Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals. Apparently, the sight of a kid getting a few million dollars to shill for a local car dealership or a predatory energy drink is 'out of control.' It disrupts the 'sanctity' of the collegiate experience. Never mind that the NCAA has been a multi-billion-dollar cartel for decades, enriching coaches, athletic directors, and various 'educational' consultants while the players were paid in 'scholarships' for degrees in 'Leisure Studies' that they will never use because they will be too busy having their brains turned into gray sludge on the fifty-yard line for our Saturday afternoon amusement.

The hypocrisy here is so dense it has its own gravitational pull. The Left is upset because the money is 'uneven,' crying about equity while ignoring that the entire university system is a machine designed to manufacture inequality and debt. They want the government to step in and ensure that the 'wealth' is distributed, which is hilarious coming from a group that hasn't successfully distributed a mail-in ballot without a crisis. On the other side, the Right is upset because the free market they claim to worship is actually working, and it turns out the 'free market' for top-tier physical talent is incredibly expensive. They want the 'glory of the game,' which is just code for 'unpaid labor that provides a nostalgic backdrop for my expensive tailgate party.' It is a beautiful synthesis of bureaucratic overreach and delusional pining for a past that never existed.

Let’s look at the lawmakers themselves. These are people who spend eighty percent of their waking hours begging for donor money, selling their souls one lunch at a time, now wagging their fingers at a defensive tackle for taking a check from a booster. They want 'guardrails.' In D.C. speak, 'guardrails' means a way for the government to ensure the money flows through the proper, established channels that they can regulate, monitor, and perhaps leverage for their own campaign contributions. They cannot stand the idea of a transaction occurring without a federal form or a committee oversight. If a student is getting paid to play, they might start thinking they’re an employee, and if they’re an employee, they might want rights, and if they have rights, the whole 'amateur' scam collapses like a house of cards in a hurricane.

The universities are equally complicit in this farce. They are not schools; they are real estate conglomerates with football problems. They cry about NIL 'destabilizing' the sport, but what they really mean is they can no longer maintain the fiction that the players are 'students' first. The facade is crumbling. When a head coach is making ten million dollars a year to scream at teenagers, and the university is spending fifty million on a 'player lounge' that looks like a Bond villain’s lair, it’s hard to argue that a player shouldn't get a piece of the pie. The institutions are terrified because the labor has finally realized its own value, and the lawmakers are terrified because they didn't get to write the rules of the auction.

This bipartisan push won't 'fix' anything. It will just create a new, more complicated bureaucracy. It will add layers of compliance officers, lawyers, and middlemen—the true parasitic class of America. They’ll pass a bill, pat themselves on the back for 'protecting the integrity of the game,' and the money will just move underground or into even more convoluted trusts. The stupidity of it all is breathtaking. We are watching the terminal stage of an empire where the only thing left to regulate is the profit margin of a gladiator’s endorsement deal. Sleep well, America. Your leaders are on the case. They’ll make sure that no one gets too rich too fast without the government’s permission. Meanwhile, the stadiums will keep filling, the CTE will keep mounting, and the 'student-athletes' will keep realizing that in the grand American experiment, you’re either the one selling the product or you are the product. And usually, you're both, and you're getting screwed either way.