Regulation madness

http://firedoglake.com/2010/05/28/the-new-disasters/

If the Repubicans were in power and making flawed arguments like this, while still continuing to make the same mistakes the Democrats make, I'd be excoriating their justifications, so, this isn't a partisan reaction to what has become a common theme on the left. I'm not a  Republican. A few days ago I commented on a blog post by Conor Friedersdorf regarding his claim that the right is intentionally making misleading accusations of hypocrisy against the ACLU, thus confirming the tendency on the right to be a closed system of thought untethered from reality, blocking out facts which contradict their views. My comment attempted to show that closed systems of thought have more to do with partisan bias and groupthink than some unique situation with the right.

I've been presenting examples of how the left is just as "closed", and, in many ways, I believe they are more closed because there's the assumption that modern liberal views are mainstream and commonly accepted as true -- so, arrogance and humbris complicate matters. At least the right know that their views are anathema to academia and most of the media. Whether this oil spill becomes Obama's "Katrina" remains to be seen, but the above article doesn't refute the proposition, it merely uses mental gymnastics to frame the oil spill as a lack of proper regulation with an implication that the Bush Administraion set it all up. There's a weak attempt to shed some doubt on whether Obama will regulate better, but the article distracts the reader from fundamental causes, and this reveals the left's guilt in the issue of partisan bias and groupthink.

Saying Katrina was a natural disaster overlooks the government's responsibility maintaining the levees. The fact of government neglect regarding the levees turned a natural incident of a hurricane into a tragedy. The gulf coast oil spill can also be led back to government actions or inactions, in that regulations have forced drilling into risky deepwater areas. We can also consider the company itself, British Petroleum, as more a government arm than a truly private company in a free market. Another consideration is that without government caps on compensation for damages caused by the company, better precautions would have been in place for such a malfunction -- if a private company understands it is at risk of going out business due to something this oil spill, they would've prepared for accidents with much more care. 

The claim that better regulation is required, intentionally overlooks all the damage caused by regulation and government intervention in the free market. This is not to say that private companies should be allowed to do anything they wish to do, regardless of the harm they cause -- on the contrary, it's a call for rational laws and limitations which prevent fraud and cronyism and severely punish neglect which harms others. Those on the left who are calling for better regulation openly admit that regulatory capture is a serious problem, yet they want us to believe that what's needed is more regulation. This is not ignorance, it's partisan bias and groupthink which continue to support statism no matter how twisted the logic becomes or how many facts have to be ignored.