The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has claimed another casualty. No,
not another oil-sloshed fish washed up on the stained sand of a
Louisiana shore. The latest life suffocated in the inky blackness
of BP’s gusher is small-government conservatism.
At least that’s what the progressive literati are saying.
Thomas Frank of the Wall Street Journal spent a
recent column giving a merry tour of Republican and Tea Party
hypocrisy. How could those who once condemned the creep of the
federal government turn around and denounce Barack Obama for not
intervening more to plug the spill? Frank concluded, “The
catastrophe is too great to brush it off with the usual
laissez-faire scholasticism. So the great debate must wait. We
are all liberals for the duration.”
His point about hypocrisy is very fair. But Frank gets it
wrong if he thinks libertarianism is in a coma until the leak
gets plugged. If anything, BP’s ugly oil platform affirms
suspicions about the world that cranky classical liberals have
always had.
I’ll admit I’m a bit of a hypocrite. I castigate
progressives for dividing the world into stereotypical groups —
the rich, the poor, the people, the powerful, etc. — and then
drawing sweeping conclusions about each one. But I, along with
most other small-government types, often indulge the in the same
mental laziness. Among my stereotypes: government workers are
lazy and ineffective; corporations are avaricious and necessary;
and politicians are self-serving and corrupt.
I’ve been watching the oil spill closely for the past
month. Check, check, and check.
The government’s bumbling over the spill is obvious.
Virtually no action was taken the first two weeks, which earned
Obama criticism even from the New York Times. Early on
in the crisis, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal requested 5
million feet of boom line from the federal government to protect
his state’s coastline. To this day, he’s only received 800,000
feet.
The feds’ primary contribution to solving the crisis so far
has been to dispatch bureaucrats in windbreakers to the Gulf
Coast to stand around peering at the oil through binoculars.
Pictures proudly displayed on the EPA’s website of agency
Administrator Lisa Jackson standing on a Gulf jetty wearing a
baseball cap don’t really inspire confidence. (They’ve since been
removed.) Then again, what else can she do? Admiral Thad Allen
admitted that the federal government, powered by a $3.8 trillion
budget, doesn’t have the equipment necessary to cap the
spill.
Then there’s the Minerals Management Service. The trusty
civil servants in charge of regulating BP’s oil platforms quickly
turned the MMS into a wretched hive of scum and villainy. MMS
bureaucrats spent the last decade sleeping with oil company
employees and then allowing them to fill out their own safety
evaluation forms. Progressives maintain that this only happened
because George W. Bush was in charge. If only Barack Obama had
sat in the Oval Office eight years sooner, they reason, the MMS
would have been a shining model of regulatory efficiency. But as
compared to what? The Department of Agriculture? The DMV?
Corporations played their role perfectly as well. BP cozied
up to the MMS and repeatedly received exemptions from
environmental inspections that might have prevented the spill.
One of those exemptions was granted in April 2009, three months
after nefarious oil baron George W. Bush left office.
BP also lobbied the federal government relentlessly,
spending $19.5 million since January 2009 alone. Contrary to
progressive campfire stories, they weren’t trying to buy
deregulation. As the Washington Examiner reported, BP
lobbied for the stimulus bill, Wall Street bailouts, green energy
subsidies, and, most notably, cap-and-trade. The oil giant wasn’t
trying to snooker incompetent government bureaucrats into
deregulating the market. They were trying to snooker incompetent
government bureaucrats into posting more red tape that would
tangle the competition and allow BP to profit.
Timothy Carney, the Examiner reporter who
unearthed BP’s lobbying records, has been documenting this
for years. Corporate predators use hapless government regulators
to enhance their bottom line. Think of the smart girl in high
school who dated the dumb jock because he was popular and had a
nice car. I doubt a single libertarian was floored when they
heard that BP and the MMS were in cahoots. It’s the way the world
works.
As I said, corporations are greedy but necessary. The Gulf
spill is a tragedy and perhaps even a crime. But what precisely
is the alternative? Oil accounts for more than 40% of America’s
total energy demands and 99% of fuel used in cars, according to
the Department of Energy. Progressives are working themselves
into a lather at oil companies. But there’s something
hypocritical to the point of being vile about Chris Matthews and
Keith Olbermann verbally assaulting oil companies from
technologically decadent TV studios illuminated by gigawatt klieg
lights. It’s a hypocrisy impossible to evade unless you hammer
together a Robinson Crusoe-style treehouse and hunt for your
dinner. Maybe oil companies are a little evil. But they’re also
completely, utterly, wonderfully life-sustaining.
That leaves my third libertarian stereotype, the
crookedness of politicians, which scarcely needs explaining.
According to a senior White House aide, Obama was informed in
April that oil would likely keep gushing through August until a
relief well was drilled. Instead of relaying this to the American
people, the president spent his time doing political ballet,
trying to shift the target of populist rage from his
administration to BP. Thus the government was “keeping its boot
on the neck” of BP, Obama was yelling in meetings to “Plug the
damn hole!” and the president was meeting with his advisors to
figure out “whose ass to kick.”
Again, politicians are self-serving and corrupt. But as
with any rule, I’m willing to entertain an exception. If Chris
Christie was president when the oil rig blew, his anger wouldn’t
be staged and comical; it would be very real. And a steady stream
of heads would be rolling down the Beltway right now. It’d be
enough to make jaded libertarians everywhere smile, if only for a
moment.
