“Only the truly powerless can be truly innocent,” is one of the many things I picked up from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In that sense, the Libertarians are probably innocent when it comes to fall out from the BP spill. When pressed, I think I have to concede that the problems in the Gulf are not the result of libertarian policy and certainly not of Libertarian politicians. However, there may be some second hand blame to pass around because of the frequency with which non-libertarian policies are dressed up with a fig leaf of libertarianism. Crony capitalism and lax oversight are often justified with vague mutterings about the invisible hand and letting the free market work.
But, among other things, as Mike Kole pointed out (in a Facebook posting), the cap on oil company liability which enjoyed bipartisan support wasn’t a libertarian move. That prompted a response from me that I thought I’d re-hash here instead of providing any original content. But first, I ought to note that Libertarians get more criticism for me because, fairly or not, I hold them to a higher standard. I don’t really expect any consistency out of Republicans or Democrats. They exist primarily for the purpose of getting elected; such principles as they have are mostly incidental to that larger goal. With Libertarians, the principles are primary and getting elected is secondary.
Anyway from my response to Mike’s Facebook thread:
I think this situation [the BP oil spill] does implicate what I regard as some weaker spots in libertarian thought. I don’t think libertarian philosophy deals well with pollution. Generally, there is a proposition that folks should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn’t injure the property or persons of others. That’s fine as far as it goes, but too often the injury from pollution is subtle, difficult to trace, and difficult to quantify; allowing its cost to be externalized onto others.
Another problem is that people frequently have the ability to cause more damage than they can pay for. I’m not sure there is any real help in this situation from libertarian thought — the victim just has to bear the loss when the culprit is tapped out. This problem can be particularly bad when the culprit is a corporation which shields individuals from personal responsibility and which have a disturbing habit of dissolving when times are tough. I understand that there is a division among libertarians as to the propriety of the corporate form. As a practical concession, I can see why Libertarians would accept corporations as a reality they have to live with. But, in terms of pure philosophy, I don’t think the corporate form has any legitimate function in a libertarian world-view, existing as it does to shield individuals from the consequences of their actions.
The invisible hand can’t and won’t clean up this mess. We need to look at why the free market might break down at this level and recognize those potential weaknesses when designing policy in the future.
Thanks for your hosting a discussion about this BP catastrophe, that has me and most all I read, worried sick. Check out the Goon Squad, where brains are tenderly washed, disinfected, and made usable again, at http://www.careandwashingofthebrain.blogspot.com, “BP: Too Big to Bail, Too Big to Fail?”
The politics of the BP spill is that it cant be the Republicans fault because Bill Clinton encouraged economic deregulation as much as any leader,which I would agree with,remembering the 90s era.Clinton taught us history onlookers about how downsizing made the stock market go up and the investors were happy.Fewer salaries to pay out allowed greater profits and dividends.
But what it meant for many was lost jobs and often promised retirement benefits down the drain..The free market just couldn’t afford having people retire to the measure they were promised.Too bad but that was our new overall successful economic system. Just check the ever rising Stock Market.
With The Bushes, with Clinton in between ,outsourcing became the next money maker for our new Reagan era investor class which was being proven valid over and over. Jobs kept disappearing but whole segments of people became affluent,some became ‘filthy rich’ because money was free and there were no rules.Everybody’s money was public and accessible,and the indiviual had no control over what the ‘investors ‘ wanted…I signed a mortgage one day and the next I got a notice that some big company I never heard of now owned it. No one asked me.
But nothing to worry about. Our new system was foolproof because the government no longer regulated investors.. Anyone could ‘flip houses’ if they were smart enough,and however anyone made money was good.One person’s wealth was everybody’s wealth and vice versa.
Teachers like me who expected to retire on public pensions were the leeches that were being phased out,and I was told more than once ‘why should I expect to have my retirement guaranteed as promised when the private sector cancelled benefits to keep the’ free market system solvent’.If ever a nmaewas falsely applied it was free maket.
(Like the term “family values’ which was a backdoor way to exclude certain ones)
There were lots of new low-paying retail jobs. $9 an hour currently if you can advance.
Health insurance was becoming inadequate for people working at Wal Mart type jobs,like so many of my family found out. Minimum wage jobs used to include health insurance; salary and insurance were one in the same.Now everyone was on his own for health insuracne,and you could always go to ER,so everyone was covered.
The ever growing investor class didn’t want to divert profit and dividends for someone else’s health insurance.Government health insurance was one of the new examples of creeping socialism,and we had only look to eastern Europe to where we would be headed.Everyone bought into the ideology of the private sector, investor society.It was the new common good defined.It was the new America.
No one could envision that downsizing and then outsourcing would eventually lead to ravenous corporate monsters like BP or Haliburton.Good luck to us all. BP doesn’t even know what to do to stop the flow.No doesn’t anyone else.All planning stopped at profit and dividends.
I dont know how the next chapters will unfold but this is how I remember the Reagonics free market ideolgy which absolutely everyone bought into sixcnew Reagan, as long as it was successful for so many.fault. Someone had to work for low wages to maintain the system,so $9 an hour as a goal was logical and right .
Im now 68 years old I can’t imagine what this country will be like in 2050,2 generations into the future. The current free market ideology will hit the dust and hopefully stay there,but may be resurrected in a new more government-regulated economic system.Right now Communist China calls the shots for us economically more than our own government.
Washington bureaucrats again in charge will be seen as ‘taking our country back’.
Too generous by half, Doug, in a political world where “liberal” has been an epithet unrelated to either its dictionary meaning or the actual beliefs of its adherents for a generation now. How many libertarians (or Libertarians) have been wearing Obama=Socialism placards for the last two years, without regard for the niceties of semantic distinction?
Are big-L Libertarians responsible for liability caps? Of course not; they have less political power than Puerto Rico. But they raise money and make their positions known, and over the past twenty some years they’ve increasingly emphasized property rights (and 2nd Amendment) absolutism. Shouldn’t they, and anyone else who advocates unfettered capitalism, find themselves in the glare of the narrowly averted global financial meltdown, and the environmental enormity in the Gulf, being asked to explain themselves, being required to tell us how we’d all be better off waiting for the Market to solve things?
Here’s a thought experiment: suppose we all wake up tomorrow morning in a Libertarian paradise, or a libertarian one. Which disappears in the first legislative session: income taxes, or a century of corporate protection under the 14th Amendment? Safety and environmental regulations, or caps on malpractice, product liability, and punitive damages? There’s more than a sense in which, being “powerless”, their principles occupy a protected circle where no adverse results accrue to them. So they can continue to argue that the rest of us should trust the environment to BP, our retirement savings to hedge-fund traders, and endure extreme, and avoidable, boom-and-bust cycles for the sake of the purity of someone else’s principles.
And I hate it that BP has hired mercenaries to keep local residents (which one Swedish director referred to as ‘little’ people, showing that BP execs think like their fellow Bilderbergers) and media away from sites BP chooses. Most disturbing is John Doty, Jr’s despairing analysis as of June 15, 2010, “Oil Disaster Will Be End of Life As We Know It”, at http://www.BilderbergIntel.wordpress.com.
And people in the coastal areas of the South-East would be very wise to have plans to vacate, if the worse that is predicted, thanks to BP, which gives Obama his marching orders. Please watch, “Cloud of Death Followed by Tsunami, Traveling at 400-600 Miles an Hour”, found on line, and recommended by Wayne Madsen. Alarming!!
Two of the finest liberarian investigators and activists , Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, are calling for the states to launch criminal investigations into BP, federal government’s role in this horrific oil spill. I agree with them, and they list the addresses and phone numbers of Governors Crist, Jindal, and Barbour, in their article that thoroughly explains their findings ofit fact and conclusion.
The article can be found at http://www.prisonplanet.com. With it is a maddening video of BP blocking media access and a New Orleans interview with its mercenaries and some minimum wage clean-up crew members.