As a sports fan I think parity is OK — but not if it’s “legislated parity” where free agency and salary cap rules result in a revolving door of players on every team and no continuity from one year to the next. The NFL is the most absurd application of legislated parity — to the point where teams that do a poor job of drafting and signing players can still manage to succeed.
I suspect baseball was the testing grounds for Common Core. It's worked so well for baseball, now lets use it in the schools.
People have the remember that the leagues as a whole are a business. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own a team in a small market if their destiny is only to be a whipping boy for big market teams. The fans in the those markets aren’t really big on it either.
The league as a whole (as in the owners in all regions) are better off when everyone has a shot at being competitive. That is the current state, and it is an improvement over the Yankees owning baseball for stretches at a time.
A salary cap was instituted in Hockey about a decade ago, and I believe it has done a lot for the league. Now if they could get rid of the awful officiating and sharp change in rules between regular season and playoffs, they might get somewhere.
Honestly I don’t understand why people actually think this is some kind of lefty plot to ruin the purity of competition or dumb down the sport. It is a way to make each franchise into a profitable business. Again, the league as a whole is a business, and each team is merely a franchise. Things have to be structured so that each franchise can be profitable or it hurts the business as a whole.
Do people object to McDonalds having restrictions on how their franchisees operate and in what density?