I don’t think that it’s true of airports, for example. I am not an expert in this, and have mostly focused on the baseball side of things, but the work I have s

I don’t think that it’s true of airports, for example. I am not an expert in this, and have mostly focused on the baseball side of things, but the work I have seen from neutral economists are pretty clear that these taxpayer dollars are not high RoI. Your comment boils down to “all government spending on this list of items is equally inefficient, so why not build stadiums instead of airports.” I think that ignores the fact that airports are infrastructure, whereas sports are entertainment. Personally, I don’t think the govt should spend money on entertainment when the financial beneficiaries could easily cover the costs. Also, in baseball, the owners are the last types of people I would support. They don’t even care all that much about the product on field - there is not a structural incentive to put a better product on the field. The comparison of billionaires to millionaires is also deceptive - that is a huge chasm, and players are being paid for producing value, using the income from their labor. Owners are paid because they have odd tax breaks (did you know they can depreciate their team purchase cost, despite team values consistently beating index returns?) Lords of the realm is a great book to get insight into MLB owners.