CRASH: Stuck On STUPID Government Mandates Disaster

Perverse incentives yield monstrous results.  Barack Hussain and his BIG GOVERNMENT fellow travelers churn out perverse incentives like nothing ever seen in America.  One disaster after another will result, as sure as night follows day.

I don't know who observed this first, but failure by BIG GOVERNMENT...or the Collective...is not a bug, but a feature.  Meaning, it is built into the system, and can't be "built out" of the system.  It is organic.  What is so damnable is that we know this.  History is rich with horrific examples, as are current events.

Obama and his collective own the Gulf disaster; front to back, port to starboard, top to bottom.

There is a Deepwater Horizon ONLY because perverse incentives yield monstrous results.  We are drilling for oil in 5,000+ feet of water ONLY because of stupid, perverse, and dangerous environmental policy, which is, in turn, predicated on lies.  Instead of drilling in safe places on land and shallow water, which we do with astounding reliability, we have been pushed to the limits of technology.  We told people to do risky things, and they did.  They always WILL.

Every aspect of the Deepwater Horizon operation was under Federal control.  That is, they did nothing of any significance without approval by one agency or another.  All those agencies are Mr. Obama's responsibility.  All the law and regulation is his charge to enforce.  Of course, nobody can, really.  And no set of people can, either.  Our government is vastly too large, and our regulations far too numerous and tangled.  They, many of them, are written on false premises, and only reflect the political "thinking" of their authors.  They are perverse, and can only yield monstrous results 

We told BP they should certify that a blow-out preventer (in the last of at least three redundant systems to shut in a wild well) would cut and crush the drill stem used in the well.  But nobody at the MMS enforced that certification requirement.  So nobody at BP (and presumptively other oil companies) provided the certification.  When you have a regulator, you do what they require.  Many regulations are ignored by both the regulators and the regulated.  And the regulated think in terms of the regulation being where their limits are, and forget about reality being where real limits are.  Perverse incentives yield monstrous results.

The Dutch offered us skimmer vessels that would have cleaned the oil out of the water of the Gulf at huge rates.  Our government turned them down, some say because of the Jones Act (a 1920 law to protect shipping interests and maritime unions), or because the discharged water from the Dutch ships was not pristine according to EPA (there being some fraction of some component of crude oil in the discharge).  So, the full tide of crude made it to our beaches and marshes.  Now we learn the skimmer technology is at work.  Too late.  So, another disaster, directly caused by perverse incentives.

The Dutch also offered dredges and people who know how VERY QUICKLY to produce berms specifically for the purpose of protecting the shore from oil.  This was a proven technology.  Nope.   The Jones Act again, and the welter of Federal agencies who have to say grace over anything like that, regardless of the temporary nature of the berms.  So disaster comes ashore while bureaucrats dither (and collect their pay).

The Obama administration lied, and they imposed a moratorium on deep water drilling.  They say it was intended to increase safety, but they know that is a lie; it has the opposite effect.  They say it was a decision based on engineering.  That is a lie, too.  The experts they consulted told them the opposite, and that Gulf operations could and should be continued after a safety review that would take, at most, weeks.  They were ignored, and a purely political decision was made to shut down the Gulf deep water drilling.  That produces a disaster all its own, and it is one that plainly derives from the perverse incentives of Barack Hussain Obama.

These are merely a few of the stories of which we know.  We will learn many more over time.  They all have the same moral; perverse incentives produce monstrous results.  Failure by BIG GOVERNMENT is not a bug, but a feature.

We learned today of a check in the work being done in Louisiana by private vessels.  They were stopped by the Coast Guard, and shut down so that life vests and extinguishers could be checked.  Perverse incentives yielding monstrous results.  It is what BIG GOVERNMENT does.