A former player makes his own “it’s for the children” argument about the collective bargaining agreement negotiations:

“You’re talking about the next four or five years of the rules that you’ve agreed to play by and what those are, but you’re also talking about the next 20, 30, 40 years of precedent,” said former Cardinals reliever Kyle McClellan, who was part of the union’s negotiation committee for the 2011 CBA. “You’re always trying to do things that will impact the game, that are going to protect the minor-league players, the kids in high school coming up to be the next players who take over. You respect what players have done in the past by working for players on their way.”

StLToday.com

Of course, the union agreed to limit the amount of money the “kids in high school” could receive as draft picks, and the the money the kids in other countries could receive through international signings.

The article also makes this great point:

While the players’ goals include gaining earlier access to higher salaries and reducing the appeal of tanking, the proposals exchanged between the sides are more complex than single mechanisms. They’re like Rube Goldberg machines. A gear or pulley they cannot agree upon makes the whole setup come apart. Talks stall.

The system keeps evolving toward more complexity. The CBA puts rules in place, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. When the rules don’t work, rather than abandoning the rule, future agreements impose new rules to fix the old rules. It might be nice for the sides someday to step back and say, “If we were starting over, how would we design a system from scratch that would be both simple and fair?” I personally think that universal free agency with competitive revenue sharing would be a good place to start (paying teams for success rather than subsidizing their poverty).