The Olympics are a giant exercise in sports socialism — or crony capitalism, if you prefer — where the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. The games never pay for themselves because they are designed not to. That’s because the International Olympic Committee (an opaque “nongovernmental” bureaucracy made up of fat cats from various countries) pockets most of the revenue from sponsorships and media rights (allegedly to promote global sports), requiring the host country to pay the bulk of the costs. Among the very few times the games haven’t left a city swimming in red ink was after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when voters, having learned from Montreal’s experience, barred the use of public funds, forcing the IOC to use existing facilities and pick up most of the tab for new ones.
Even that’s far from fair. If anything, the Olympics should be compensating the host city for the hassle and inconvenience, not the other way around. The only reason they don’t is because the Cold War once stirred retrograde nationalistic passions, blinding the world to the ass-backwardness of the existing arrangement. Londoners are signaling that this can’t go on.
Shikha Dalmia, “Why London Is Yawning Over the Olympics: Have Western countries finally outgrown the sports socialism of the Olympic Games?”, Reason, 2012-07-31
July 31, 2012
QotD: The crony capitalist Olympics
Comments Off on QotD: The crony capitalist Olympics
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
