It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [19]
In the case of BP, it asked the State of Louisiana if it could drill in five hundred feet of water, and Louisiana said it could. The federal government vetoed that and told BP it could only drill in five thousand feet of water. Never mind that no oil company had ever cleaned up a broken well at that depth and never mind that the feds had never monitored a broken well at that depth and never mind that BP only needed to set aside seventy-five million dollars in case something went wrong. The feds trumped BP’s engineers, and the feds trumped the wishes of the folks who live along the Gulf Coast, and the feds decided where this oil well would be drilled.
Disaster struck. The feds did nothing. Oil gushed out in an amount that is so great as to be immeasurable. Political pressure grew. President Obama eventually panicked because he believes that his federal government can right every wrong, regulate every activity, and protect us from every catastrophe (“Daddy, did you plug the hole?”). He is wrong. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was ready to build barriers to protect his State’s coastline, and the feds said no. The President even invoked powers that allowed him to supervise the cleanup using BP personnel and equipment. And the oil still gushed. Then, the President stopped all oil drilling in the Gulf, putting thousands out of work. Then, he demanded billions from BP so his team could decide who gets it, and a terrified BP gave him all the cash he asked for.
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So, the government that foolishly limited BP’s maximum liability, the government that claimed it knew where best to drill, the government that actually stopped locals from protecting their own shoreline—that would be the same government that bankrupted Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the post office, Amtrak, and virtually everything it has managed—now wants to decide who gets BP’s cash.
The last time this government had this much private cash to give away, during the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, it disregarded well-settled law and gave it to the labor unions. To whom will it give this cash—the innocent injured or its political friends?
The government cannot protect us from every catastrophe, especially ones its rules have facilitated. How about this: That government is best which governs least. The people have a right to a government that obeys the laws of economics, the laws of physics, and the Constitution. Let private enterprise do what it does best, and keep politics out of the way. If the Constitution was written to keep the government off the people’s backs, it is time for the feds to get off.
I Revoke My Consent to the Government’s Declaration of Dependence
Some important and influential American colonists recognized Paine’s criticisms, and consequently exercised their positive moral duty to disobey an unjust government, a duty to which we will return in the last chapter of this book. These colonists, who were all delegates of the thirteen colonies, gathered together to form the first Continental Congress of the United States of America. Their first job was to form a committee of delegates to draft the first law of the United States, which was the Declaration of Independence. On June 11th 1776, the Congress appointed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to a committee in charge of drafting the declaration.
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Thomas Jefferson’s Movin’ On Up on the Free Side
This committee then voted to delegate the responsibility of drafting the declaration to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. John Adams subsequently passed the sole responsibility to Jefferson because of Jefferson’s education in the classical liberal philosophy espoused by John Locke on which the Declaration was to be based.