>any city that passed on this opportunity would have to describe to their constituents
So, democracy in action? Constituency wants something, and politicans have to obey? Or do you prefer politicans to decide by themselves and not having to explain their decisions back to their constinuents?
-- H.L. Mencken
You have a point that the Olympics analogy isn't great. One other flaw is that cities aren't contractually bound to deliver the promised incentives, either. Olympic athletes can't change their performance after the fact.
I find myself in an uncomfortable situation, where I'm defending Amazon (who I have no relationship with aside from being a customer) and not even liking the HQ2 selection process, even a little. But it's just hardball negotiation that was conducted a bit more publicly than countless other site selection processes for countless other companies.
I think this could be argued. The thing about democratically elected politicians is that while you can't "force" them to do something, there can be enough political pressure to effectively compel them to do something. In this case, any city that passed on this opportunity would have to describe to their constituents why they didn't want to bring 50,000 high-paying jobs to their city. It's much easier to just play ball, hence over 238 submissions.
> Should we dispense with competitive processes completely? Why have the Olympics, for instance, because it's such a waste of time for everyone that doesn't medal?
Do the Olympics change the rules in the middle of a competition like Amazon did?
> the Scott Walker/Foxxcon debacle is a completely different category than the HQ2 situation.
It is different in many ways, but also similar in a number of ways. Specifically, both used the promise of X number of jobs to extract a set of concessions, then proceeded to chop that jobs number in half.