Olympics and the Egalitarian Bunk

Politicians and their mainstream sycophants frequently lectures, directly and indirectly (through media), the public about the supposed necessity of having a society based on ‘equality’ or egalitarianism.

Unfortunately they hardly practice what they preach.

Professor Tibor Machan exposes the egalitarian balderdash.

The Olympic Games come in very handy for those of us who find egalitarianism morally and politically intolerable. The Games show how little appeal there is to forcing everyone into the same mold, how much violence and coercion it would--and where attempted does--take to even toy with bringing about an egalitarian society.

The only place where equality has a decisive role in human social affairs is when it comes to protecting everyone’s basic rights. This is the way the Declaration of Independence finds room for equality. Once everyone’s basic rights are secure, from that point on no room exists for equalization in a just human community.

Sure, there can be special areas where equality can be of value, for example in the application of standards and rules, as shown in athletics. But even there equality will apply in highly diverse ways--one way in the classroom, another in the legal system, and yet another at a beauty contest. General equality belongs only in the protection of individual rights, period.

Elsewhere it is just as it’s illustrated by the Olympic Games, with variety and differences breaking out all over. As long as these are peacefully obtained, as long as ranking comes about without corruption, there is nothing objectionable about inequalities in human affairs. Furthermore, attempting to make things equal achieves the exact opposite since those doing the attempting will enjoy the worst kind of inequality, namely, power over their fellows as they try to manipulate everyone to be equal.

Just as elsewhere in most of nature, in human affairs, too, inequality is the norm. But since human beings are free to establish various rules in their societies, they have the option, which they ought to exercise, to preclude all coercion from human interactions. Beyond that, it is futile to try to exclude inequalities in human affairs.

It is not inequality that needs to be abolished but coercive force. With that achieved, at least substantially, let diversity and difference be the norm. As that old saying goes, “Vive la difference.” Any serious examination of the prospects of an egalitarians polity should reveal just how insidious the idea is. Just consider requiring that all outcomes of the Olympic Games be equal!

The simple point is that Olympics is all about the inequality of human affairs. The fact that governments promote Olympics has been an implicit recognition of such diversity.

Yet in reality, the politics of egalitarianism represents nothing more than convenient excuses to implement social policies of redistribution or interventionism and the rule of philosopher kings.

The IRS Awaits US Olympic Winners

Poor US Olympic athletes.

Triumph from years of hard work will only mean that much of their earnings (seized) taxed away by the IRS.

From America’s Tax Reform, (bold original)

While 529 hardworking athletes proudly represent the United States in the 2012 Olympics, any medals and money they earn wearing red, white and blue will be taxed by the IRS. According to research done by the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, U.S. Olympic athletes are liable to pay income tax on medals earned and prizes received at the London games.

American medalists face a top income tax rate of 35 percent. Under U.S. tax law, they must add the value of their Olympic medals and prizes to their taxable income. It is therefore easy to calculate the tax bite on Olympic glory.

At today’s commodity prices, the value of a gold medal is about $675. A silver medal is worth about $385 while a bronze medal is worth under $5.

There are also prizes that accompany each medal: $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze.

So how much will U.S. Olympic medal winners have to pay in taxes to the IRS?

	Medal Tax	Prize Tax	Total Tax Burden
Gold	$236	$8,750	$8,986
Silver	$135	$5,250	$5,385
Bronze	$2	$3,500	$3,502

American gold medal winners will pay the IRS up to $8,986. Silver medal winners will pay up to $5,385. Bronze medal winners will pay up to $3,502.

Of course add to the miseries of the world Olympians are the vastly reduced value of their medallions which I showed earlier.

Below is from the Economist,

Calculations by The Economist find that this is much more than the "podium value" of any previous gold medal (based on estimates of the composition of medals and bullion prices at the time, adjusted for inflation). This is partly because gold and silver prices are now historically high and partly because this year's medal is so much heavier, even though the extra weight is silver rather than gold. For the first time, the silver in this year's "gold" medal is actually worth more than its gold content. Moreover, if the metal content of earlier medals is valued at today's bullion prices, the London gold is worth only just over half of those handed out in 1912.

Yet the above signifies as evidences that governments barely reward the efforts and merits by their citizenry.

Quote of the Day: Olympics: A Giant Exercise in Sports Socialism

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.

This is from Shikha Dalmia at Reason. (Hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

Politicized activities are frequently characterized by guilt, envy, anger, finger pointing, victimization, divisiveness and covetism.

The astonishing record breaking feat by China’s 16 year old lady swimmer, Ye Shiwen, who even bested the 50 meter free style record of male American swimmer Ryan Lochte in the men’s race triggered swirl of rumors about “doping” which she vehemently denies.

Even without proof, such controversies reveal of the intolerance of the establishment of the unorthodox, where they would instead resort to mudslinging or rumor mongering.

As Professor Kling recently wrote

Politics channels the base emotion of hatred. A lot of political actions derive from hatred of the other.

Such antagonistic controversies only highlights the socialism of sports via the Olympics.

P.S. I was bogged down by the day long power outage (localized earth hour) yesterday so I wasn’t able to do much posting.

Even in the Olympics, Central Planning Fails

Why do Olympic games suffer from financial losses? Because Olympic planners think that they have it all worked out.

From the Telegraph,

-Large areas of empty seats seen in stadia for the second day running

-London 2012 chairman Lord Coe reveals students and teachers are also being called in at the last minute

-Every tout arrested had tickets sent to foreign VIPS

-Organisers Locog have begun an investigation into the ticketing fiasco

To the chagrin of political authorities, to cover on the scores of empty seats, students and soldiers had to be bussed in.

This is a familiar scene in the Philippines which we call the “hakot crowd”

Again from the same Telegraph article,

Last night, Team GB cyclist Geraint Thomas said: ‘It’s quite sad, seeing all the empty seats.’

Lord Coe revealed yesterday how troops, students and teachers were being drafted in to help end the embarrassing spectacle of empty seats at Olympic venues.

By discriminating against the markets, authorities had these coming to them after all

Professor Christopher Westley at the Mises Blog rightly points out,

The Olympics are essentially mercantile events in which planning takes place outside of market forces so as to achieve outcomes preferred not by consumers but by states. (Peter Hitchens argues here that this trend started with the 1936 Olympics in Berlin when Hitler and Goebbels transformed them into “grandiose and torch-lit” spectacles.) Regardless, the events in London are demonstrating once again what an LSE economist in the 1930s said about economics–that its “curious task” was “to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.” Why did Sebastian Coe and his team think they could effect a better outcome than what would result from the price system? These are practical men, but even Keynes might admit that they are probably slaves of some defunct and incorrect economist.

So at the end of the day, financial losses extrapolates to the debasement of medallions for winners or may even lead to higher taxes for the unfortunate London residents whom has hosted such grand boondoggle.

Even Olympic Medals have been “Debased”

While I am a fan of sports, I am not a fan of the Olympics.

Olympics, for me, represents the politicization of sports premised on feel good nationalism, which are largely financed by massive expenditures of taxpayer money.

The economics of Olympics suggests that the popular games, except for some instances (e.g. LA Olympics), have incurred losses for the hosts. At worst, financial losses extrapolated to higher taxes.

Professor David Henderson notes of the Canadian experience,

That view is understandable because losing money has been the norm. When the Olympics were held in Montreal in 1976, for example, the loss amounted to $2 billion, which was $700 per Montreal resident. And remember that that was in 1976 dollars. That loss resulted in a special tax on tobacco because, you know, smokers are such fans of the Olympics.

And proof of the politicization of sports via the Olympics can be further seen through the medallions for the winners—where the content of the London 2012 medals has been materially debased or devalued.

Image from BBC.

The Zero Hedge points out (bold original)

As every Olympic athlete knows, size matters. The London 2012 medals are the largest ever in terms of both weight and diameter - almost double the medals from Beijing. However, just as equally well-known is that quality beats quantity and that is where the current global austerity, coin-clipping, devaluation-fest begins. The 2012 gold is 92.5 percent silver, 6.16 copper and... 1.34 percent gold, with IOC rules specifying that it must contain 550 grams of high-quality silver and a whopping 6 grams of gold. The resulting medallion is worth about $500. For the silver medal, the gold is replaced with more copper, for a $260 bill of materials. The bronze medal is 97 percent copper, 2.5 percent zinc and 0.5 percent tin. Valued at about $3, you might be able to trade one for a bag of chips in Olympic park if you skip the fish.

The devaluation of the Olympic medals just exhibits the natural or deep-seated impulse of governments to inflate, as well as, to break their own established rules or standards—sports or no sports.