Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Gartner

Market logic is doing double duty here: it explains the world and absolves the speaker from it. Gartner’s line takes the familiar pain point of modern sports and higher education - eye-watering coaching salaries - and reframes it as a neutral outcome of “a market economy.” That phrasing is doing quiet ideological work. It implies inevitability, not choice; forces, not priorities; economics, not ethics.

The wit is in the faux-obvious “so of course.” It’s the shrug in sentence form, a journalistic move that sounds like clarity while sandblasting away the messy questions. Who defines “great”? Who benefits from treating coaching as scarce genius rather than a system built from recruiting budgets, facilities, and institutional prestige? And why is this market allowed to run hot while other parts of the same institutions (teachers, reporters, public servants) are told to accept austerity?

The subtext is a gentle indictment of the audience’s selective outrage. People love the competitive theater of sports and hate the price tag, but Gartner suggests you can’t worship the spectacle and then act surprised when the labor closest to the spectacle gets valued like a star commodity. It also hints at the arms race dynamic: salaries soar not simply because coaches are rare, but because rivals with deep pockets bid against each other to avoid falling behind.

Contextually, the quote reads like a veteran editor’s realism: a way to puncture moral panic with an economic explanation. The sting is that the explanation isn’t wrong - it’s just incomplete, and Gartner knows it.