Catledge wrote:Dude, Norway requires that rigs off their coasts have an extra layer of fail-safes than our government requires.
um, ok...
my point was that even in the absence of "capitalism", accidents like this will still happen. that accidents like this have, in fact, happened when the drilling was done by state-owned firms in the absence of "capitalism" is a matter of simple historical record.
the ixtoc oil spill and the laundry list of environmental disasters caused by the soviet union should provide interesting reading if you wish to learn more.
The suggestion that government could have done nothing to prevent this flies in the face of an extraordinary amount of evidence to the contrary.
evidence after the fact?
regulators aren't going to be able to know every possible regulation to enact in order to prevent every possible worst-case scenario. unless we're talking about omniscient, omnipresent demigods as regulators, we'll still have situations where they only realize after the fact that this regulation or that regulation would've prevented this or that from happening.
furthermore, i don't see why government would be any better equipped to handle these things than a voluntary organization charged with the same goals. how likely is it that the regulators will know more or as much as about the industry they're regulating as the people whose livings are made in that very industry?
the only way to mitigate the knowledge gap would be to hire someone from the industry you wish to regulate to work as a regulator for that industry. of course, i'm sure you can guess what happens when you do something like that.
imo. we'd be better served by a legal order that exposed companies who are responsible for disasters like these to full liability for the damage they have caused. i think that would prove a lot more formidable to these irresponsible corporations than bumbling or complicit government regulators.
I might not blame this on the concept of capitalism, but market fundamentalism -- the idea that the government should never meddle in business -- does bear a significant amount of blame.
i'm well aware of what market fundamentalism is as i've been accused of it quite a bit since i abandoned social democracy some two and a half years ago. as for what "market fundamentalism" has to do with this disaster you will have to explain in finer detail.
seems to me that government meddling
in favor of oil exploration played a pretty large role in making this mess. i would have to think that not having their liabilities capped by the government at $75 millions--chump change for a company like bp and a pittance in comparison to the actually damage they will have caused--would make companies like bp a lot less willing to play fast and lose with other people's livelihoods.
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