Chuckling, a commenter at Alicublog:

One would hope the NFL referee lockout helps wake more people to the realization that plutocracy is ugly and getting uglier. The issue isn’t about money. The retirement contributions in question aren’t even pocket change for the billionaire NFL owners. No, they don’t feel their employees deserve a good retirement. They don’t feel their workers efforts are worth even a smidgen of their enormous net worth. They want it all not because it buys them anything extra, but in order to punish the lesser folk for their failings. It’s a bizarro meritocratic thing for people that don’t have a lot of merit.

This sounds spot-on to me.

The cost of the what the refs want and the owners refuse to agree with is about $3 million per year. That’s around $62,000 per team or less than $13,000 per individual game played. It could likely be covered by the sale of literal peanuts at each game, or perhaps foam fingers. This is not a lockout about money. It’s a lockout about breaking organized labor and taking away benefits from people who do high quality work and help make the owners billions of dollars.