Big fucking waste of capital. I just wrote about this topic actually.

Guy at work was trying to tell me that the stadium would be great, because it would "create lots of opportunities, like dumb jobs for high schoolers." That's a verbatim quote by the way, and he was being serious. But the same would be true of digging ditches and filling them back up; lots of dumb jobs for high schoolers.

And if it's a net gain for the State to confiscate $500 million to build boondoggle stadia, why not have them confiscate all money and just manage it centrally? According to my coworker's logic, the political process allocates resources best-- so why not maximize a good thing? I posed that to him, and he gave up.

What's funny is that proponents of the stadium defeat themselves with their own arguments. "Well, if we don't 'subsidize' the stadium, the Vikings' business will be unsustainable, and they'll leave." Yes; that is exactly the point. If the only way for a business to be viable-- hogging up finite resources during its existence-- is to prop itself up with stolen money, then that clearly isn't the optimal use of those resources.

Then, of course, they argue, "but the economy is otherwise stagnant; if we don't have the stadium, we'll have nothing." To which I respond, "yes, because you're misallocating capital with shit like stadia!" Total compliance with the regulatory state is almost two trillion dollars per year. And just the Federal government alone is extracting almost three trillion dollars per year in taxes. When you're causing five trillion dollars of malinvestment annually, yes, the economy is going to be stagnant.