The Olympic Sweatshop

I don’t like human rights, environmental activists or the Olympic Games. You might call me crazy for this belief. After all, these three things are beneficial to mankind, and most of their participants don’t make a lot of money.

Maybe I have been shaped by the fact that I was born in the Soviet Union, a country that was determined to bring peace and happiness to the whole world, and I’m a bit distrustful of these “do-gooders.” I prefer the guys who work for a profit, provided that the country is built in such a way that they contribute to the common good.

Take, for example, the noble task of helping refugees. In 1949, after the Arab-Israeli war that resulted in more than 400,000 Arab and Jewish refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was founded. That was 60 years ago. You’d expect the Jewish refugees, devoid of the UN agency’s help, to starve to death and the Palestinian refugees to be well off. But today there are no Jewish refugees, and the number of Palestinian refugees has grown to 4 million.

If you just look at the prominent headquarters of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, it is clear that the UN will never stop providing help for refugees. As long as the agency continues to operate, the supply of refugees will never end.

And consider the environment issue. Millions of people are dying from environmental poisons, acids and heavy metals. Who could argue against the fight against pollution? But the Kyoto Protocol does not limit pollutants. It limits completely harmless CO2. The concentration of CO2 in the Jurassic or Devonian periods was from seven to 12 times greater than today. And this is precisely because CO2 is an integral part of the biosphere. It can also be the source of a lucrative trade in carbon quotas.

The Olympic Games are watched by millions of viewers who celebrate the great physical achievements of the human body. But there is one big lie behind these wonderful athletic feats: The Olympic athletes are referred to as “amateurs.”

Is figure skater Yevgeny Plushenko an amateur? Is he just a faceless office clerk who dabbles in skating during his lunch hour?

The misleading word “amateur” simply means that the people who spend eight hours a day training for the Olympics have no income except for the small stipend given to them by Olympic bureaucrats. They are the slaves of the Olympic bureaucracy, both national and international. They are human fodder in the big bureaucratic sport industry. The cynical use of the word “amateur” is meant to conceal the fact that when an athlete doesn’t earn money after he succeeds, it means that somebody else is earning his money instead.

What are the dangers to open society that are most often discussed in the West? North Korea, Iran, terrorism, Russia and a few others. I think that the danger posed by rogue states is quite exaggerated.

The collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated that no dictatorship can compete in the long term with an open society. At the same time, however, the Soviet collapse paved the way for the emergence of the global bureaucracy, which, devoid of Communist predators, proliferated without any checks or controls.

The danger for the West can come only from within. Ultimately, its national bureaucracies must answer to its voters.

The global bureaucracy wants to succeed where the Soviet Union has failed. It is anxious to help the poor and save the planet — not by discovering and making a profit, but by regulating and distributing.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.