Olympics: Auditing the Capitalist Games

Though Moscow's move will hurt, the mood is still upbeat

The unofficial name for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles is the Capitalist Olympics—so called because every cent of the $475 million budgeted to stage them has come from private sources, primarily U.S. corporations. But as every capitalist knows, the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith's marketplace economy not only provides bounteous rewards, it is also perfectly capable of delivering a sucker punch. It was far too early to tell whether the Soviets, in leading an East-bloc boycott of the Olympics, had landed a...

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