The caricature of the Tea Party type holds a sign and calls every single government action "communist." Please tell me how this caricature is not on display here:
Today's evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government's control of economic life. The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is.
For the uninitiated, "statism" means "any increase in government activity." That is a charitable interpretation (on my part). Because the other one would be "communism," which wouldn't make this any different from the average Tea Party screed about health care or guns.
So let's get this straight.
- An under-regulated and unmonistored private industry, which enjoys by the way subsidies of all sorts (highways, etc.) incentivizing its products, caused what appears to be a calamity affecting the economy and ecology of entire region, if not the world.
- One contributing factor to the disaster was lax oversight.
- Therefore, this is not an argument for government regulation.
That's really silly I think. If we have an argument for effective government regulation, even if it requires "statism" (God is that term dumb), then this is it.
On the other point in the paragraph, by the way, oil is dirty in the procuring (seeMexico, Gulf of) and dirty in the using (see Warming, Global).