19 December 2011
Libertarian Chimera Hurt More Than Help
To follow through on the cry for removing government regulations and thereby allowing a free market to restore America's commercial primacy and eliminate unemployment, consider the Presidential aspirants' discussion of nuclear waste storage. As a viable energy source, private industry certainly could build a nuclear power plant without government "controls," "regulations," and other labelled 'deterrents' to free market capitalism. Individual companies would build, operate and sell electrical power at prices that provide the return on investment required to their owners/stockholders desired increase in the capital worth of the businesses.
Additionally, the individual power companies would be left to market forces to determine the most economically viable means--if any--to dispose of the nuclear waste from their operations. What better way than to sell it and recover operating costs?
There are no market mechanisms, no "guiding hand" inhibiting their options regarding the handling of nuclear waste or, for that matter, for managing their nuclear rod inventories.
Experiences demonstrate how real the risks of deregulation are:
- I ask you to look at Fairchild's contamination of San Jose, California, by operating its microchip and disc manufacturing under the banner of "a clean industry" and no effective health and safety oversight by that city.
- The absence of government oversight enabled the economic devastation of the Gulf Coast from BP's contractor's inadequate oil rigging and operation. Millions of people were affected in the coastal regions, thousands of businesses interrupted possibly never to resume, and thousands of acres of arable land mass was rendered useless due to contamination or poisoning of the resident eco-systems of birds, animals and plants?
Cf. Greg Palast documentary on LinkTV.org "The Vulture's Picnic," based on his book by the same name, in which he explains "why we occupy" to a UC Berkeley audience.
- The nuclear power plants in the US were built a long time ago. How confident are we that these facilities, built under a set of standards amended several times since, operated or maintained as if forgotten by the general public. I wonder how many of the residents within a 200-mile perimeter of the Hanford, Washington, nuclear facility know that it was built using the same design as was the plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine?
- Remember when all of the CEOs of the domestic tobacco products companies testified under oath to Congress that cigarettes did not pose a health threat in America? How many of those men have been prosecuted for perjury for their testimony?
- The heads of the domestic-based petroleum corporations and the heads of the U. S. automobile industry testified under oath that they had done nothing wrong. At least the oil companies did not ask for more federal funding support; they already had it. These men were all there, I have to point out, to support federal interference in their market economies through subsidies, capital loans, tariffs, whatever would keep them in their market positions for a predictable period of time.
How could the heralded, Free Market have improved the outcomes or have prevented those disasters in the first place? No one from the media or from within the political parties is calling the libertarians and pseudo-libertarians on this problem with Adam Smith's version of unfettered capitalism. Without some legislated consequence for remedy when a collateral disaster happens in an unregulated economy, where is the incentive for taking responsibility for safety of employees, customers, and others directly or collaterally affected by an owner's actions? Personal morality? Please, this is business.
None of these ideas are new.
None have brought enough votes to elect a conservative Republican candidate. Since the 1950s, the same, tired platitudes have been repeated, but every new President has discovered that the real world is controlled by forces never debated in their campaigns. Poor Newt is just ignoring that his own personal life decisions resulted in his losing the Speaker office and his House seat due to his 1998 censure by his peers for unacceptable conduct (vote was 375-50), his decades of lobbying for K Street clients, and his hypocrisy about family values by his several marriages.
None have brought enough votes to elect a conservative Republican candidate. Since the 1950s, the same, tired platitudes have been repeated, but every new President has discovered that the real world is controlled by forces never debated in their campaigns. Poor Newt is just ignoring that his own personal life decisions resulted in his losing the Speaker office and his House seat due to his 1998 censure by his peers for unacceptable conduct (vote was 375-50), his decades of lobbying for K Street clients, and his hypocrisy about family values by his several marriages.
Perhaps the real problem is that the people who may be most qualified to be President are too busy living their lives with integrity, empathy, happiness, spiritually rewarding situations and wisdom. If this is the case, then we have one more reason for the widening gap between Washington and the public. If the qualified men and women of the Republican Party have withdrawn from the candidate pools, then the federal government has become even less relevant to business and consumption within our economy.
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