Conservative and Libertarian pundits are having an outrage competition among themselves over Obama getting BP to put some money up front for victim compensation.\u00c2\u00a0 The best and the brightest pontificaters are joining the dumbest and the dullest and they’re all spitting mad.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s an Outrage!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a Shakedown!\u00c2\u00a0 A Shakedown, I tell ya!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s bad and evil and will lead to the fall our republic!<\/p>\n
This is why I’m a small <\/em>L Libertarian.\u00c2\u00a0 Pragmatic.\u00c2\u00a0 Willing to compromise when it’s necessary.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, according to the Big Ls, someone with no principles.\u00c2\u00a0 (Libertarians spend an inordinate amount of time comparing the sizes of their Ls.)<\/p>\n I understand the ideological viewpoint and can see where the pundits are coming from.\u00c2\u00a0 From a conservative or libertarian viewpoint the correct and proper way to do this is to let it wind through the courts, slowly, slowly, and eventually, get compensation to some of the victims.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what happened with the Exxon Valdez mess.\u00c2\u00a0 Two decades later there’s still oil sitting\u00c2\u00a0 below the surface of the ground.\u00c2\u00a0 Much of the fishing business still hasn’t recovered.\u00c2\u00a0 The lucky residents and business people have received pennies on the dollar. Others got fractions of a cent on the dollar.\u00c2\u00a0 The rest have received nothing.<\/p>\n That’s the right and correct and legal way to do things.<\/p>\n Discarding Utopian ideology for a pragmatic approach makes a lot more sense.\u00c2\u00a0 Victims can get reimbursed faster and have a chance to recover at least somewhat from the massive mess BP created.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a small bit of payback as well.<\/p>\n Big Oil is one of the special interests that owns congress.\u00c2\u00a0 They receive special tax consideration, huge discounts on leases, and other favors that have saved them tens of billions of dollars over the years.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, BP gets to pay some of that back.<\/p>\n Twenty billion dollars may sound like a lot, but the mass media isn’t reporting that it’s really five billion a year for four years.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a pittance for a company the size of BP, with assets worth over six hundred billion dollars.\u00c2\u00a0 It would be like you or me having to pony up five hundred bucks a year.<\/p>\n We can only guess at the conversation Obama had with BP.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d like <\/em>to think it went like this:<\/p>\n “Guys, you’re going to have to pay out sooner or later, so let’s do this.\u00c2\u00a0 You set aside five billion a year for four years, and we’ll announce you’ve put up twenty billion.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve got a good guy to do the payouts, a fair and independent guy who has lots of experience with this kind of thing.\u00c2\u00a0 It will give you some good PR, which you really need.\u00c2\u00a0 It will also head off lawsuits, because people who have already been paid won’t have as much of a case.”<\/p>\n That would be great.\u00c2\u00a0 A friendly agreement designed to benefit everyone.<\/p>\n But maybe it went like this:<\/p>\n “Ya got a real nice oil company here.\u00c2\u00a0 Real nice.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it, ya know what I mean?”<\/p>\n Considering that BP caused this mess by cutting corners and ignoring basic safety practices, I’d have no problem with that approach either.<\/p>\n Sometimes you’ve got to set the ideology aside to do something that works. That’s why I sport a little L. It’s rather cute, and much more useful in the real world than a big one, which often just gets in the way and looks ridiculous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Conservative and Libertarian pundits are having an outrage competition among themselves over Obama getting BP to put some money up front for victim compensation.\u00c2\u00a0 The best and the brightest pontificaters are joining the dumbest and the dullest and they’re all spitting mad.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s an Outrage!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a Shakedown!\u00c2\u00a0 A Shakedown, I tell ya!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1230,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}