The Government Hand That Feeds
It is well enough known that the Nazis innovated the modern Olympic iconography: the torch ceremony, the photogenic mass fandom in the monumental stadiums braying for reflected national glory. If they discovered what looks good to the human eye (art is art after all), it’s less of a lesson than the fact that they also innovated the Olympics as a “stimulus” program in the 1936 Games, taking from all taxpayers but rewarding only the politically plugged-in few. This creates an ecosystem of political power, which totalitarian nations understand quite well; the frequency with which this tool is reached for is no accident. The American-hosted 1932 Olympics was a very modest affair by comparison. It shows how a fascist virus of an idea can infect a democratic host.
Olympic infrastructure building never works as a general stimulus. It didn’t in 1936, and doesn’t today. A simple Google search easily reveals this fact. Either the Olympic organizers don’t know how to do a simple web search, or there are other agendas in play. There was a lot less waste in the London games and Salt Lake City because Olympic corruption is also a mirror reflecting the corruption of the hosting country.
Part of the stadium building fetish must be pure aggrandizing: It’s hard for a politician to reflect in the glory of correctly doing the little things required of government in its normal duties. It’s why California politicians can throw red meat to their green constituency by requiring its own specifications for lawn mowers but can’t pass a budget.
But there is also the hand-that-feeds corruption dynamic: concentrated benefits and diffused payment. Which is how residents of Rio get impossible-to-maintain stadiums, but they still can’t get a sewer system; there’s simply no money, hence political power, to be gotten from the poor. Man has known how to get good water into and bad water out of a city for two thousand years. Not building a proper water system is not an engineering or technological challenge, but a political one, and the incentives are not aligned with the needs of Rio’s poorest. Brazil can build on a large scale when motivated to do so. So, we can charge that their failure to attend to the sanitation issue is a matter of motivation. The importance of clean water is the most basic and well known public health issue in the history of mankind. The costs of Rio’s water disaster will be generational, even if they fix the problem tomorrow: sickness and distress can impair brain development in children. But Brazilian public works can be galvanized to throw an Olympics like a bankrupting wedding party in a poor Indian village.
It’s a wonder any Brazilian politician can walk the streets in safety from his constituency. By my lights, Brazil rioted over this way too little. That must be where the power of their Christ the Redeemer is; Jesus must be saying “don’t hit the Public Works Minister, he knows not what he does, let me give you a hug.”
What does this have to do with libertarians? Aside from our advocacy of simple financial rules for the tax-take, which would minimize the Government’s power to throw a ruinous wedding for a plugged-in few, the knock on us so often is weakness in having a central government too small to get large public works projects done. I would call this as an advantage. Large public works projects can be beneficial, but they are so often ruinously wasteful and not calibrated to the right place at right time. This is why all the Japanese stimuli have not worked in over twenty years.
Totally private Companies built the IRT, BMD, IND lines of the New York City subway. Since the government took over management of the subways nothing has been built since Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate, and it seems like the Second Avenue Subway line will take as long as his career span: 21 years. The MTA can’t even keep what’s built clean.
Libertarians policies wouldn’t build wasteful things that create and feed politically wealthy dynasties. it’s political power-logic that forces California to build its high speed rail line in a place where it will never be used so that they can continue to build more of it. Now we have this massively expensive boondoggle just at a time when a revolution in shared resources and distributed car dispatching is nigh.
The evolutionary process counts. Nobody would raise an eyebrow if you pointed out how the course of a river was determined by the evolutionary factors of its run: bank type, large stones, turns, trees. But try to talk about the dangers posed to the public’s purse when evolutionary tools built by corruption are left in the hands of politicians, and people think you are a fanatic.
Our corruption levels are not yet what they are in Brazil. I think, however, that we are headed in that direction when we spray money into the air for California’s high speed rail while the emergency rooms in San Francisco remain dangerously overcrowded.
The corruption practically required by the Olympics has its roots, and its practical uses, in states that wield economic power for the benefit of the ruling state and for the purpose of brokering political power, often in contravention of reasonable public interests. We, the political heirs of the Western tradition, should permanently turn our faces from the Olympics until there are structural reforms. Actually, we should structurally reform our own building and stimulus processes, and worry about the Olympics when we have a better example to set.
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