BP not to blame for Gulf oil disaster

Barack Obama and his minions in Congress and the Liberal media have been relentlessly castigating BP executives for months now over the Gulf oil disaster. Leftist radicals from Obama to Rosie O’Donnell have used the crisis to justify everything from shutting down and entire industry to nationalizing BP’s American operations.

Well, I’ve got news for you. The real cause of the disaster was the federal government.

The bottom line is that when the government takes responsibility for regulating an industry, it also accepts accountability for what happens on its watch. Ironically, this kind of big brother relationship with business increases the likelihood of irresponsibility in the regulated industry. The accepted standards for safety, employee relations and ethics that should rightly be the domain of the business owners are supplanted by the standards set by the regulatory apparatus.

With bribery and corruption as the norm in Congress, where the regulations are written and passed into law, the standard for good business practices is preempted by the standards of favor trading and back-room deals. In this unrestrained culture of corruption, it is remarkable that disaster hasn’t struck sooner.

In any hierarchy, the standards of those at the top set the tone for the whole system. When government agents from the President down employ bribery as an acceptable business model, what else can we expect from low-level managers and regulatory flunkies?

The real enemy here is a flawed model for government intervention in the private sector, especially in the realm of regulation. This faulty paradigm, when coupled with the rampant culture of corruption throughout government, cannot help but infect businesses under government’s thumb.

History is riddled with examples of corrupt, cruel and inept governance, yet there are relatively few examples of the same systemic flaws in private business. However, we accept time and again that the agency most likely to be corrupted; most likely to abuse its power; most often proven untrustworthy; should be in charge of making sure businesses operate in integrity.

If we are to condemn BP for the oil spill, we must first address the unchecked culture of corruption which infests every level and branch of our government.

Fix that first, and then we’ll talk about BP.