Tune into John Stossel's eponymous Fox Business show tonight for a pre-Super Bowl special titled, Big Sports…Big Business. If you're into sports at all - especially the particularly awesome and awful form of vassalage known as college sports - you're in for a real treat.
I'll be talking with Stossel about performance-enhancing drugs and whether they should be treated as categorically different from other forms of potentional advantage. And whether it's more dangerous to take steroids or slam your body into heavily armored 300-lb. men or fly down a mountainside clad mostly in Lycra. And I recommend the performance-enhancing drug that Congress ought to popping (it sure ain't Viagra).
Here's the rundown of the show, which airs tonight onf Fox Business at 9pm ET and will be rebroadcast at various times over the next few days.
Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest gambling day of the year. Have you placed your bets? Be careful, even friendly bets between friends are illegal in about half the states.
Former professional poker player, Annie Duke, joins the show to argue that it's not the government's job to police decisions between consenting adults. Patrick Basham, author of Gambling: A Healthy Bet, says gambling is actually good for you.
Big money is made in college sports, but the athletes don't get a cut. Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University Professor, says they should.
Lance Armstrong is an evil jerk because he bullied and threatened weaker people, not because he used performance enhancing drugs. I say, if he used performance enhancers, so what? These drugs are similar to Lasik eye surgery and other ways people seek competitive advantages. Reason's Nick Gillespie argues that they make sports more interesting.
Politicians like Chuck Schumer want to ban ticket scalping. Many Americans agree with him. But economist, JC Bradbury, says scalpers receive a bad rap for providing a service that people actually want.
One of my favorite sports, MMA….is illegal in my own state! UFC Chief Operating Officer, Lawrence Epstein, talks about his battles with New York politicians.
Finally, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, billionaire Mark Cuban, plays with this thought experiment: what if government ran sports?
