{"id":16289,"date":"2012-07-31T09:17:39","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T14:17:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16289"},"modified":"2012-07-31T09:17:39","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T14:17:39","slug":"qotd-the-crony-capitalist-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/07\/31\/qotd-the-crony-capitalist-olympics\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The crony capitalist Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The Olympics are a giant exercise in sports socialism &mdash; or crony capitalism, if you prefer &mdash; where the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. The games never pay for themselves because they are designed not to. That\u2019s because the International Olympic Committee (an opaque \u201cnongovernmental\u201d 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\u2019t left a city swimming in red ink was after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when voters, having learned from Montreal\u2019s experience, barred the use of public funds, forcing the IOC to use existing facilities and pick up most of the tab for new ones.<\/p>\n<p>Even that\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t go on.<\/p>\n<p>Shikha Dalmia, <a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2012\/07\/31\/why-london-is-yawning-over-the-olympics\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Why London Is Yawning Over the Olympics: Have Western countries finally outgrown the sports socialism of the Olympic Games?&#8221;, <em>Reason<\/em><\/a>, 2012-07-31<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Olympics are a giant exercise in sports socialism &mdash; or crony capitalism, if you prefer &mdash; where the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. The games never pay for themselves because they are designed not to. That\u2019s because the International Olympic Committee (an opaque \u201cnongovernmental\u201d bureaucracy made up of fat cats from various [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,84,53,41,18],"tags":[727,71,350,314],"class_list":["post-16289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","category-politics","category-quotations","category-sports","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-debt","tag-london","tag-olympics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4eJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16290,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16289\/revisions\/16290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}