This week Alex Rodriguez took the field as the most expensive baseball player ever.

Before, he was a posterboy for his good looks and sweet swing. Now he’s a posterboy for athletic greed. A-Rod’s new contract is for a quarter of a billion dollars over ten years, which works out to almost $20,000 per inning he plays.

And so, A-Rod’s the grinch for wanting so much cash, right? If only he were less grabby, baseball would be better, right?

That’s the easy way to read it, and that’s the way the media tends to see things. But there are some basic economic questions that most people seem to miss. I’m no economist, but I do want to raise a few points that I just don’t hear much about.

To start with, everyone laments that baseball players are paid millions to hit home runs. But I hear far fewer complaints that Britney Spears gets paid millions to shake her hips on a Pepsi ad, or that Bill Gates rakes in billions for producing flawed software. That’s just accepted as the lunacy of capitalism.

The problem with A-Rod isn’t uniquely a sports problem, but something inherent to the tyranny of market economics – what people pay a lot for, other people will get paid a lot for, no matter how useful (or useless) it is to society. At least A-Rod won’t crash and need to be rebooted every half hour.

If A-Rod and Britney are signs of capitalism, then baseball owners are the robber barons, the cold-blooded Rockefellers. And that brings me to my next question: How much do owners make? No one knows. They won’t tell. What I find strange is that few fans ask in the first place. To me it seems like a logical question.

My own wild guess is that owners are like CEO’s of other companies – they want to be the highest paid person in the organization. They’re not going to fork over several million to a rookie and then cut their own salary to minimum wage to compensate. Few owners are in this just for the warm fuzzies of being around a baseball team.

But why, pray tell, is it an outrage that players are paid millions to hit home runs, but not an outrage that owners give themselves millions to sit around and smoke cigars? Again, the culprit is capitalism, not sports. This is how an enterprise is run.

And while we’re looking for other villains in this mess, you can’t ignore the agents. Too often, they’re behind a player’s demands. Everyone in Cleveland right now is steaming mad at “greedy” outfielder Manny Ramirez for leaving the Indians to sign with the Boston Red Sox for $160 million.

What no one talks about is that Ramirez lives in a $700-a-month apartment and drives a ’96 Chevy Impala, and that in last December’s negotiations, when Ramirez’s agents turned down Boston’s first offer of $107 million, Ramirez, who struggles with English, sat by quietly, who knows how oblivious.

Another culprit is the player’s union. Ken Griffey Jr. will tell you that you’ll get a phone call from the union if you, like he, accept a few million less than you could get, as Griffey did when he signed with Cincinnatti a year ago. You’re hurting other player’s chances to get more money, the union told him.

The union also wants to look tough when it negotiates baseball’s economic rules with the owners, and so it won’t give in and accept even the most sensible measures, like a salary cap. I have no confidence things will change in time for the next negotiating session this coming winter, and I see another strike or lockout on the way.

I’m not saying there’s no such thing as player greed. You better believe there is. But if we’re going to complain, and we should, we have to make better complaints. Major League Baseball isn’t an anomaly, but just another example of how screwed up capitalism can get. Until the league adopts some forms of communism – i.e., sharing money among teams and capping salaries, as football and basketball do – we’re in for a lot more crazy economics. America, what a country.