Just in the past week, and particularly after his lame performance in Thursday's press conference, the media has begun to criticize Barack Obama for his response to the big Gulf oil spill.
I don't wish President Obama any good. Like Rush Limbaugh, I hope he fails. But when I say that, I mean that I hope his agenda fails. I hope the disastrous consequences of his policies will serve to discredit his ideas about the unlimited power of government.
And that's why I have to oppose the criticisms of the president over the oil spill, because the basic premise of these criticisms is: the president of the United States is responsible for everything. Which means: the government is responsible for everything. To criticize him for failing to do enough to stop the oil spill is to buy into Obama's own philosophy of government: that its power, oversight, and responsibility is unlimited and extends over all private action.
Some conservatives (and many Republican partisans) have been drawn into these criticisms as payback for the scurrilous attacks on President Bush over Hurricane Katrina. They note that Bush actively intervened in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and greatly increased the federal role within a few days, while President Obama did little about the Gulf spill for more than a month and even now seems to be interested mostly in assigning blame to others.
These people point out that, by the same standards used to judge Bush in 2005, Obama has been much worse. That's true—by the same standards. But it is those standards that we should reject.
Since when is the president responsible for managing the response to every industrial accident, from mine collapses to oil-rig blowouts? Since when is it any of his business?
It is British Petroleum's business. It is their responsibility to cap the well (as they now seem to be doing), to do whatever they can to mitigate the spill, and to pay for the damages and the cleanup. The courts should be involved in adjudicating the exact extent of the damages and of BP's responsibility, but that is really the whole of the federal government's legitimate involvement.
The federal government, in our political system, was designed to do very little: to provide for the national defense and to adjudicate a delimited set of legal cases that involve interstate actions. Even the police, which are a legitimate function of government, are not really a federal responsibility. And "industrial accident cleanup" is definitely not among the enumerated powers granted to Congress in Article I.
But nobody cares about the Constitution any more. Under the novel theory of government we've been living under for most of the past century, there is nothing that is not the business of the federal government. And so even as he is being criticized for making an unconvincing show of being "engaged" on the oil spill problem, President Obama has been trying to use that very failure as an excuse for further expansion of the government's role. His response to every criticism has been the same as the response given by Wesley Mouch—the flailing central planner in Atlas Shrugged—when his interventions fail: "I need wider powers."
And so Obama has said that his biggest mistake was to trust the oil companies to handle the spill—rather than putting the government in charge right away. And he has issued a moratorium on new permits for offshore oil exploration, until a new federal commission can convene and come up with a plan for more restrictions and taxes to impose on oil companies.
Ironically, Charles Krauthammer points out one way in which the government did make things worse. By systematically blocking oil exploration on land, in the shallower waters just off the coast, and in the Arctic, the government has driven oil companies to drill wells in the very deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where a well blowout like this one is much more difficult to fix. And unlike an oil well in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area with nothing around it but barren tundra for hundreds of miles, the wells in the Gulf of Mexico are right in the middle of prosperous fishing grounds and tourist beaches.
That said, I also think that we need to return to a more old-fashioned attitude toward industrial accidents. Today, they are considered utterly unacceptable catastrophes for one reason: a large segment of the culture does not accept that it is legitimate for heavy industry to exist at all and has a particular animus toward industries that generate power—including oil and coal. So they exploit every accident to promote their pre-existing agenda of shutting down all oil exploration. But if we accept that the Industrial Revolution is a good thing—that it has roughly doubled the average lifespan and vastly increased our quality of life—then we accept that the oil industry has to exist and that occasional accidents are just part of the cost of living.
But the really old-fashioned attitude we need to bring back is the one stated by Calvin Coolidge, the last American president who really understood what our system of government is supposed to be about. When asked about the top achievements of his administration, he replied: "I minded my own business." So should President Obama.—RWT
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