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COMMENTARY
June 12, 2010
Ship of fools
We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed.So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can't accept, and therefore don't ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand. This is amusing, in a way: a memorable illustration of ... the sort of stuff I keep going on about. Which is to say, the law of unintended consequences, which pertains with especial virulence to all acts of government regulation. Reagan and Thatcher were eloquent on this, but made little progress against entrenched interests. My reader may imagine exactly what entrenched interest keeps the Jones Act in place. A large part of the function of all regulatory bureaucracies is granting exemptions to the moronic rules. This, in turn, creates the conditions for massive corruption, and in the case at hand, the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" -- regulators and regulatees working hand-in-glove. It is the stuff that brilliant Scottish moralist, Adam Smith, warned us against back in 1776. A "symbiotic relationship" tends to evolve, in 100 per cent of cases, between the big businesses that dominate an industry, and the big government that regulates them. They share such common interests as eliminating competition. Now, an exemption can be granted even to the Jones Act: by executive order, all the way to the top. This was granted, promptly, by the Bush administration, when it was organizing the rescue arrangements that responsible local authorities had failed to provide, at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Which was, incidentally, a vastly larger environmental catastrophe than the piddling oil leak that now commands the news. But the Bush administration had a huge advantage over its successor. Bush had gone out of his way to find competent people, with experience of their fields, to staff his administration. Many were despised throughout the media for their known conservative tendencies, but what can you do? For another axiom of David Warren Thought is that everyone is conservative, in a field he knows something about. Reciprocally, there is a tendency to sport more and more liberal views, the greater one's ignorance of a field (and therefore of its constraints). And let me note, caustically, that President Obama is pretty liberal right across the board. Bush had not, as his successor has, loaded up a ship of fools consisting of academic ideologues, under no particular direction from a captain who is himself off playing golf, and partying with America's coolest people. Which is exactly what Obama was doing for weeks after April 20, when Deepwater Horizon blew up; though to be fair we should also mention the fundraisers and commencement speeches. But there is little evidence that, away from his TelePrompTer, he does anything except appoint more fools to run the government for him. Karl Rove, who was Bush's extremely competent chief of staff, mentions Obama's old habit of voting "present," for which he was famous as a state senator in Springfield, Illinois. And he might have become famous for the same in the U.S. Senate, had he not checked out entirely, and begun running for president moments after he arrived. Has the Obama administration heard of the Jones Act yet? The answer is apparently yes: they found out this week, indirectly, from the usual source: a conservative think tank. So we have the spectacle of Eric Holder, the attorney general who denies there is any causal relationship between radical Islamism and Islamist terrorism (I'm not kidding about this), looking for legal ways to "kick the ass" of the very people on whom America depends to stop the oil spill. And this while his boss employs winged words, to destroy the share value of a company on which innumerable pensioners depend. And all this, while the most obvious action to deal with the problem has been overlooked. I don't hate these people, by the way. I do hate the ideologies they serve, but really, Obama and his various radical "czars" are the first victims of the balderdash they spout. One after another is fated to be pushed, politically, "under the bus," as a consequence of actually believing the nonsense. On the other hand, I don't feel sorry for them. They come, almost to a man or woman, from backgrounds of complete insulation from normal human life, and are infused with the rarefied gas of pure theory. Worse, most seem to lack the moral formation to put a check on their own lust for power. Bush and company had some humility, admitted errors, and could learn from mistakes. This lot can't. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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