As part of my never ending shameless campaign of self-promotion, the following
is an article of mine published at
http://www.etherzone.com/2010/beam051010.shtml.
Roderick T. Beaman,D.O.
Board Certified Family Physician
Protect freedom. Disarm the government.
OILY POLITICIANS
AS CRUDE AS IT GETS
The ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil
rig has the environmentalists howling. Bill Press and Ed Schultz, the
syndicated radio talk show hosts and governmentalist mouthpieces, are hawking
wind & solar power and are calling for more regulation. Both are hosting people
like Mike Popantonio who co-hosts another radio show with fellow liberal
attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Pres. Barack Obama has now placed a moratorium on new offshore drilling, just
weeks after announcing the need to increase it. In another sign of the times,
as in the December 1984 disaster, when the Union Carbide facility in Bhopal,
India released tons of methyl isocyanate into the air and water, attorneys are
flocking to the Gulf Coast area. Popantonio is interesting because Wikipedia
lists him as a mass torts expert. And based in Pensacola, he is salivating
Liberals across the country will all draw the most convenient lesson, that more
regulation is necessary, meaning more restrictions. Unexamined will be just how
much the regulations which are already in place were left unenforced by the
federal government.
My first question was where were the regulators? Surfing porn sites with their
fellows at the SEC?
Not Schultz, not Press, not Popantonio, not Kennedy, not Chuck Schumer, nor
Barbara Boxer, et al, will ask what role complacency, at meeting government
standards, might have played in this disaster. I can just see it now. BP
executives being hauled before Congress for its show trials and saying, "We met
all applicable governmental standards."
Or maybe they didn’t. And maybe it’s a West Virginian mining disaster redux but
no matter. Few, if any, government heads will roll despite any incompetence
unearthed by investigators. As just about every observer knows, government jobs
are lifetime positions. There might be a few sacrificial lambs here and there
but most of them, who a re protected by various civil servant statutes will not
lose their jobs. Those that do will find receptive companies eager to have
another Washington insider to help them through the thicket in that company
town.
BP may pay millions, even billions in fines which will only be passed along to
consumers, directly in the form of higher gasoline prices and, indirectly, in
the prices of anything that needs oil products for its production and delivery
which means every product manufactured in this world.
Further regulations will be passed which will also further increase the cost of
production of oil which will also be passed along to the consumer but they will
be passed without a shred of proof that the lack of regulations was the cause
in the first place. I, personally, don’t think that it was.
On the Schultz show, Popantonio was bemoaning that BP didn’t install a cutoff
valve that would only have cost between 300,000 and 500,000 dollars. They are
used, he said, in Europe by the Dutch, as I recall.
Well, if the regulations didn’t require it, and they didn’t install one, was
that not false complacency? On everyone’s part? If insurance companies were
doing this, rather than government, wouldn’t they have been far more likely to
demand them had they been underwriting the project and stood to lose a huge
amount of money? This crucial question will never be asked.
Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard have both destroyed the arguments for
government regulation of anything far better than I ever could. Suffice it to
note, that if any private company regulator had allowed this to happen, he’d be
canned.
But there is an even far more crucial question. Why are we so dependent on oil
in the first place?
There is no doubt that at our current level of social advancement, we have
attendant energy needs that are outstripping our ability to meet them. There is
no doubt that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power can help
and that geothermal energy also offers great potential. I have great doubts
that they could meet our needs, however.
What everyone must agree on is that it would be futile and fatal to return to
reliance on wood burning for our needs. As quaintly attractive as that might
be, the attendant smoke would make every city uninhabitable. The air would
choke us. Green might be attractive but gray smoke isn’t.
That key cause of our dependency on oil is the internal combustion engine,
typified by the automobile. It is central to our reliance upon it.
There is no doubt whatsoever that we have become a society that is overly
reliant upon the automobile. The automobile pervades our lives and culture. It
need not be. I submit that the main reason is zoning and land use laws, which
are prima facie, unconstitutional, uncompensated assaults upon property rights.
Zoning laws are among my pet peeves.
As usual with all government things they accomplish the precise opposite of
their intent which is to preserve and develop community character. Remember
that zoning laws were meant to enhance community character when you next gaze
upon your local mall. We have created a suburban nightmare where you can’t walk
to get a gallon of milk.
I submit that zoning laws are the major culprit. My solution? Repeal each and
every one of them and allow property rights to reclaim their place in our
culture.
I believe that we would see a significant reduction in the use of automobiles
within two years and maybe one. Neighborhoods would flourish as property owners
realize that they can use their homes for their own economic improvement as
well as for domiciles.
This will not happen because it would reduce the power of government. Power to
a politician is like heroin to an addict or a drink to an alcoholic. There is
never enough.
A politician cannot permit this and that is why such a simple solution will
never be adopted.
Instead, the egotistic thieves in Washington, Sacramento, Austin, Albany,
Tallahassee, etc. will focus on the automobile itself and legislate mileage and
emissions. Liberals do not care about correcting causes, despite their
lamentations and wailings about the root causes in other matters such a crime
and poverty .
They care about controlling human behavior. In this, they are no different from
Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin whose goal was to control the destiny of every human
being on the face of the earth.
Again, it’s a power thing. Correcting the cause in such a way, eliminates the
need for politicians. The dirty little secret is that liberals, as exemplified
by Franklin D. Roosevelt, despise the people of this country and are interested
only in their personal power. It is an unpublicized fact that FDR was a nasty
person, viciously chewing out everyday workers he happened across. In this, he
and they differ little from Lenin, Stalin and Pol Pot who also despised
ordinary workers.
There is a final point to ponder. Please note that in all of this, there has
been little, if any, of the old time American spirit to ask how we can stop
this from happening again. Instead, the question from all quarters has been how
can government stop this from happening again.
I have neither heard nor read any suggestion that we turn to God for guidance
and then to look within ourselves for answers. This is precisely what the
Democrats, socialists, fascists, communists, collectivists, governmentalist (or
whatever you want to call them) want. They want us to look to government for
solutions, not ourselves and certainly not God.
Karl Marx was correct in a way when he called religion the opiate of the
masses. It was where we turned to for God’s guidance. These people want us to
turn instead to government as the substitute opiate and in that, they have been
successful.
