Check out this excellent essay by Jesse Spector (via Deadspin). Here is an excerpt: “… the owners are trying to make every last penny available, and the lockout will end when they feel they’ve squeezed until they can squeeze no more. Watching it happen in real time … is simultaneously painful and uninteresting. If I wanted to watch capitalists in their final form, manipulating workers and ignoring anyone or anything caught in the crosswinds of their greed, I could look at any other industry in America.”

Alas, Mr Spector and others fail to realize that this labor dispute is a “reciprocal problem” — to borrow my intellectual hero Ronald Coase’s thought-provoking formulation. To see this, here is how I would re-write Spector’s sentence:

“… the [players] are trying to make every last penny available, and the lockout will end when they feel they’ve squeezed until they can squeeze no more. Watching it happen in real time … is simultaneously painful and uninteresting. If I wanted to watch [labor unions] in their final form, manipulating [their firm’s customers] and ignoring anyone or anything caught in the crosswinds of their greed, I could look at any other industry in America.”