It's a chance for world class athletes to compete at the highest level most will ever see. It's just sad that cities like Rio that are cesspools of crime and corruption get involved. Chicago wouldn't have been much better.
I get that, but they just make cities waste money on elaborate massive scale penis compensation contests and enormous venues that are rarely really used much afterwards.
No. It just takes something that's already there, and pushes it to an extreme (in this case, corruption and greed). The Olympic Committee already requires that the buildings be reused after the Olympics (it's in their specifications), but there is no way to enforce this.
I live in a country that hosted a European football championship quite a few years ago. All the stadiums that were built from the ground up are still in active public use to this day.
Capitalism would be some investors or local govt doing a cost/benefit analysis, and determining that the long term benefits and the increase of revenue to local businesses outweighed the cost. What you're seeing is the opposite of capitalism, where unrestrained government apparatchiks use other people's money to fund monuments to themselves. Like big government? Here ya go. The bigger it gets, the harder it is to keep checks and balances on its operation.
What city ever was in the running for something like this and said, "Nawww...too expensive at this point?" Add in the corruption and mandatory bribes for the International Olympic Committee--not a corporation, btw--and you've got the recipe for this.
The LA Olympics were organized by a capitalism-minded guy for 1984, and they actually made money for the city + other benefits. But, yeah, "capitalism is bad" because you can't trade your skills for money the way successful employees and entrepreneurs do.
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I live in a country that hosted a European football championship quite a few years ago. All the stadiums that were built from the ground up are still in active public use to this day.
What city ever was in the running for something like this and said, "Nawww...too expensive at this point?" Add in the corruption and mandatory bribes for the International Olympic Committee--not a corporation, btw--and you've got the recipe for this.
The LA Olympics were organized by a capitalism-minded guy for 1984, and they actually made money for the city + other benefits. But, yeah, "capitalism is bad" because you can't trade your skills for money the way successful employees and entrepreneurs do.