Once a government pet, BP now a capitalist tool
By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
June 9, 2010
“Lobbying records show that BP is no free-market crusader, but instead a close friend of big government whenever it serves the company’s bottom line.
While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels. ..BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a lobby dedicated to passing a cap-and-trade bill.”
Timothy P. Carney: Republicans should end the Big Oil bailout
By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
May 21, 2010
“The federal government has no business protecting BP from paying for the harm it has done to shrimp fisherman. The liability cap and the spill fund are subsidies for oil drilling. In a free market, oil companies would have to buy more insurance to cover the cost of a potential spill. In other words, a free market in oil drilling would mean no liability cap, no 8-cents-a-barrel tax, and no special fund whereby careful drillers pay for sloppy spillers.”
Oil spills, movie stars, robot unicorns and regulation
“Even before the current oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico it was well understood that drilling offshore sometimes results in spills. The current oil spill in the news has brought the idea of spills to the attention of many, many more people, people who don’t usually think too much about these things. But it isn’t obvious to me that the spill should cause us to revise our estimates of the likelihood of spills, or otherwise alter any of the factors that go into well reasoned policy analysis. And if all of the inputs going into a well-reasoned policy analysis stay the same, then the policy recommendation should stay the same too…. you should identify the new policy-relevant information upon which you base your call for changes. Or, in other words, you should specify what was wrong with your understanding of offshore oil development as of about two months ago, and then explain how correcting that mistake leads you to favor more restrictive regulations.”
In a Truly Free Market, BP Would Be Toast
“Advocates for the regulatory state are fond of complaining that things like the financial meltdown, the BP oil spill, and the like, are the result of an “unregulated marketplace.” But it was federal loan guarantees that first made securitized mortgages into a marketable asset. And I wouldn’t consider a $75 million cap on liability to be exactly “laissez-faire.”…What passed for federal regulations were ineffectual because, among other things, it’s not the federal government’s own money that’s at risk. Things get downright chummy between regulators and regulated. Inspectors sleeping with executives and snorting crystal meth off of toaster ovens is what you call a “public-private partnership,” I guess.”
“But if relations between regulators and regulated aren’t really all that adversarial, you know what is adversarial? Relations between insurers and the insured… Insurance companies take the kind of adversarial attitude toward the insured that liberals only wish government regulators took toward regulated industries.”
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