Big government Libs bait & switch tea party arguments via the oil leak.
The Obama administration is feeling a lot of heat regarding their reaction to the continued oil leak in the Gulf. Rather than be the executives who, you know, execute action to solve a problem (hence, The Executive Branch) the Obama administration is instead focusing on “whose ass to kick” (i.e., lawsuits — and what else would one expect from lawyers) and shifting blame. This week the blame goes to the Tea Parties and fiscally responsible conservatives. Watch how deftly Obama misrepresents the arguments of those who advocate limited government (including thus by definition James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, et. al.).
Here’s Obama to The Politico’s Roger Simon:
In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”
The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.
“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”
The president makes two fundamental errors in his argument, and we’ll look at them in reverse order to which he made them.
First, it’s ridiculous to compare a Federal response to the worst petroleum accident in the history of the country to daily Federal intrusions into our lives. Indeed, the very argument of those who advocate limited government is that national disasters are precisely when one should expect an overwhelming Federal response. No fiscal conservative or tea party I know is saying that government has no role (that would be the anarchists, the people who riot at world trade meetings, and hardly conservatives).
Conversely, the tea parties legitimately question, for example, daily government intrusions on your wallet and liberty vis-a-vis the type of light bulb you may place in your home, or how many gallons per flush your toilet may use, or how much money you must pay your after-school high-school employee to check out your customers at a register, not to mention Michelle Obama’s toe-dipping into the pool of the government determining what foods are or are not good for your family.
This is why Thomas Paine (of Common Sense) wrote that government “in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one”; and why Thomas Jefferson similarly argued never to misread the “General Welfare” clause: “They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare…. [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”
The second fundamental error President Obama makes is his implied assumption that a lack of regulation enabled the BP oil leak. I have a hard time believing that when we’ve got a Federal agency called the Minerals Management Service (MMS) — an agency that the vast majority of Americans had probably never heard of six months ago — we really don’t have a plethora of federal, state and local regulations guiding the energy company. On top of that we’ve got the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and slew of other bureaucracies — again, federal, state, local — that must on a daily basis wade through no doubt pages of regulations that when stacked are higher than an oil rig. And that’s just the complexity that our government must interpret — imagine how much it costs BP, Chevron-Texaco, Exxon-Shell, etc., and thus how much that costs you and me at the pump. Remember, it was this same MMS that gave the Deepwater Horizon oil rig a safety award last year. So how would have giving the MMS, or another agency, more power prevented this accident? There’s not one shred of proof it would have.
Now, this isn’t an argument against regulation carte blanche. Rather, it’s an argument that the facts show that that oil leak was not a systemic problem — such as Obama argues — or caused from a lack of regulation, but rather caused by a series of human errors — the humans at BP and in the government did not follow the regulations, and indeed not even follow BP’s internal regulations or oil and gas industry common practices!
This understanding — that the problem was human, not systemic — is best explained, by the way, by a small Colorado oil and gas company president this weekend in the WSJ. In short, summarizes Terry Barr, the employees at BP and at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig chose to press forward despite a minimum of three “red flags” which any other company in the energy industry, argues Barr, would have halted operations.
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