So, has this whole situation altered your opinion on unfettered capitalism and government regulation, or even on the merits of offshore drilling in any way Cross?

No.

Government regulations weren't followed and were inadequate. Reckless exemptions to government regulations were given....by the government.
That's supposed to be the answer to everything right? Regulate and tax everything until the world is filled with fluffy bunnies.

Here: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-k ... nario.html


See? The market has a solution for and future prevention of what government allowed to happen.
BP can go the way of Texaco and be a shining example how never to handle this type of operation again.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Obviously this is an argument about what should happen, and that doesn't necessarily mesh with what does happen. But in this situation, regulations were not followed. So doesn't that at least imply that by following regulations, it could have been avoided?

Even if all regulations were followed and the MMS wasn't busy smoking crack and servicing oil executives, the government left the design and engineering of the blowoff preventer to an oil industry funded group.
That's what ultimately failed.

So, even in a perfect world, regulations failed and the market will fix this.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Yeah, but again, I wouldn't say regulations written by industry executives constitute a "perfect world".

Sure, and I would argue a perfect world is unattainable, accidents happen, good people die etc etc.

Government doesn't have a solution for our imperfect world and never will.
Giving it ever increasing power in a quest for that goal is silly at best and dangerous at worst IMO.

One more regulation or one more law or tax isn't going to prevent the next mega-disaster...it's going to happen anyway.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

This one was preventable though. Government can't stop a hurricane, or a virus, but the Deep Water Horizon was not inevitable.

It was also preventable from a self-regulating aspect. If the market was as infallible as you make it out to be, then giving so much power to business should have stopped this from happening. BP should have been more conscientious about safety because they have competition who customers would turn to if they fucked things up. But that's not what happened either.

I'm willing to admit that regulation is no magic solution. When are you going to admit the same is true of the all-fixing Market?

I'm not saying it's infallible, because it actually requires things like this to occur. Regulations are proactive, market corrections are reactive.
The government "maybe, kinda, coulda, shoulda" stopped BP from allowing this to happen. And it "maybe, kinda, might" in the future.
The market will make sure BP never does it again. Period.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

That is such a naive way to view the market man. There was a financial bubble that popped in the late 1920's. So why didn't the market keep the same thing from happening again?

By that logic, the market should have crippled Exxon for the Valdez spill, and that hasn't happened.

Exxon appealed the $5b punitive damage award down to the few hundred million mark.

From March 31st, 1989 (7 days after the spill) to today, XOM's stock value has gone up 450%.

Well....I'm talking about free market capitalism as it relates to businesses, not "the market" as in the inter-dealings of financial institutions.
But, frankly, those bubbles were quite different. A bubble isn't a bubble isn't a bubble.

If we don't double dip on sovereign debt on this one, the latest bubble to burst was a housing bubble.
You know who I blame a lot of that bubble on? Federal regulation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

Yeah, a regulation to encourage lending to people that otherwise wouldn't qualify.
The best laid plans and all that...

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Hold my beer and watch this...

The Valdez spill was a fraction of this one.
You're ignoring the example of Texaco.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

That's what I'm talking about.

It wasn't XOM when the spill occurred, it was Exxon.
Maybe, just maybe the merger with mobile increased their stock price.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

The Exxon / Mobil merger didn't happen for 10 years after the spill. If the market was intended to 'take care' of Exxon by forcing it to be purchased, that failed.

Maybe, just maybe, you're grasping at straws on this one because you're too proud to admit your pat answer to all economic questions doesn't actually work in every situation.

And here I was thinking it was caused by speculation and bad lending practices. Perhaps you meant a lack of regulation?

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No it's too much regulation obviously. Just like the Love Canal, if they had just left that one to the free market, the pollution wouldn't have happened.

In case anyone has been asleep for awhile I have bad news for you. The entire US economic model is fucked from hell to Hanoi. The slim margin of Americans at the top making big money in the market don't give two shits about an oil spill after it's all in the past. The market has a short term memory when it comes to things and doesn't do well when asked to "learn lessons." Oil spills are nothing more than an inconvenience to the market and I just don't see it "righting" anything.

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