in first not preventing and then managing a man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as it proved in managing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, can we finally put to rest the inane (not to mention counter-factual) Krugman argument that the Bush Administration’s incompetence in handling Katrina was a result of the government being “run by a political party committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution?”
Indeed, if we want to follow Prof. Krugman’s argument to its logical conclusion, given that we have had two administrations in a row that have believed in big government and have proven incompetent, maybe having the government run by believers in government causes incompetence.
Or perhaps government just has some structural flaws that transcend the ideology of whatever party happens to be in power.
UPDATE: Amusingly, some commenters are insisting that the Bush Administration failed because it was composed of bad people who hated government but (a) the Obama Administration hasn’t failed with regard to the rig (how about Nashville, then?); or (b) the failure was a result of corporate malfeasance, which somehow makes it different from a failure that resulted from a natural disaster; or (c) the Bush Administration failed because its members just didn’t care about the people who lost their lives and homes under Katrina, whereas, apparently because empathy is an inherent part of being a liberal Democrat, the members of the Obama Administration really, really care.
Putting aside the partisan component, this does demonstrate a difference in mindset between (many) liberals and libertarians. Liberals tend to believe that government fails because the wrong people are in power, or the right people were not given enough power to do good. Libertarians tend to believe that government failure is a result of poor incentives and other structural problems that can sometimes be mitigated, but are always looming over government action.
CC says:
What? Government didn’t run the oil rig.
May 17, 2010, 8:26 amDavid Bernstein says:
CC, you realize, of course, that (a) “the government” didn’t run the hurricane, either; and (b) that “the government” was in charge of regulating the rig.
May 17, 2010, 8:30 amPierre Corneille says:
Mr. Bernstein,
You’re obviously right that government didn’t prevent the oil disaster and failed (at all levels, not just federal) to do what it might have to help people before and after Katrina. Further, the fact that Obama has been in power for more than a year suggests that he cannot blame only his predecessor for lax regulatory policies.
But how else, besides government, can one address some of these problems. Maybe the Katrina debacle wouldn’t have been so much a debacle without government–maybe voluntary associations of libertarian-minded folks would have united together and coordinated a timely escape from New Orleans and reconstruction of the city. But when it comes to the oil rig, isn’t the issue that BP et al. should have been better regulated, non left unregulated?
Government is often (usually?) incompetent, but sometimes (not always), it’s all we have.
May 17, 2010, 8:33 amDavid Bernstein says:
Yes, though I tend to believe that the more things government does, the less it does well, in part because the more things it does, the harder it is for anyone to monitor it.
True, but that’s no reason to live in the Krugman fantasy land that government somehow becomes competent if you put liberal Democrats in charge.
May 17, 2010, 8:35 amAllan says:
David,
You write:
I don’t think Krugman is saying that. Instead he is saying that the government somehow incompetent when you put Republicans in charge. To paraphrase Churchill: The Democrats are the worst at running government, except for everyone else…
May 17, 2010, 8:40 amJoseph Slater says:
You’re omitting the facts and arguments underlying claims by folks like Krugman. To pick just one example, FEMA had a very good reputation and track record under Clinton / prior to Bush. Under Bush, not so much — and it’s more than plausible to think that Bush making an entirely unqualified political hack like “Brownie” the head of that agency had something to do with that. Especially since it was something of a theme in the Bush administration to prize political loyalty over competence. And if you think that’s just the characterization of a Bush critic, think again: the Heritage Foundation did a piece when Bush came into power explicity urging that approach.
Can you show something analogous with the Obama administration and regulation of off-shore drilling?
May 17, 2010, 8:41 ampc says:
Prof. Bernstein, is your solution to have less regulations of the companies that run the oil rig? Even with the lax regulation, the companies still used shoddy equipment that was unsafe by their own standards. Do you think that having less federal regulation will incent companies to use higher quality (and more expensive) equipment?
One thing we might be able to agree on is the government should get out of the business of capping damages.
May 17, 2010, 8:43 amSteve says:
I don’t see the evidence of incompetence in the present situation, but then again, I’m the sort of person who doesn’t see the socialist takeover of our health care system either.
May 17, 2010, 8:44 amDr. K says:
This whole episode reeks of cronyism. BP was a big contributor to the Dems in general and Obama in particular. They wanted to save a few bucks, so they asked MMS for permission to change well established proceedures. Proceedures that were put in place to prevent for such an occurrance happening.
Those proceedures were developed not by a bunch of bureaucrats stiiting around a table coming up with rules based on SWAGs. They were developed through years of experience and learning from similar accidents.
So BP asks the regulators to violate industry accepted best practices, and the regulators give them a green light.
Recall also that BP has less than a stellar safety record over the past decade.
So I ask you, who is the bigger screw-up: BP for asking the regulators to look the other way, or the regulators for allowing them to go ahead with an unsafe practice?
May 17, 2010, 8:44 amDavid Bernstein says:
That may be true, but surely we can distinguish cronyism, which is endemic in government appointments and was perhaps more endemic than usual in the Bush Administration, from libertarian hostility to government.
May 17, 2010, 8:45 amDavid Bernstein says:
Alan, I’m afraid you didn’t make it to his last paragraph: “What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all.”
May 17, 2010, 8:47 amPierre Corneille says:
Mr. Bernstein,
I would just add that to me, it’s not how much government can do, it’s how much it can do competently and what policies, institutional structures are in place to prevent people from “capturing” government. I suppose if we disagree, it’s where we draw the line. I share your skepticism about government, but I’d be inclined to draw the line so as to permit more government regulation than I suspect you would.
At any rate, thanks for your thoughtful reply.
May 17, 2010, 8:48 amCC says:
Who said it did?
No. Government, in the US, only regulates human activity, subsidiarily. People regulate themselves, our government can’t function, otherwise.
May 17, 2010, 8:57 amAllan says:
David,
Would we not all agree that a government that works is better than a government that is incompetent?
Our disagreement is about how much work the government should do.
Republicans seem to be content to let the government do a lot badly.
Democrats want the government to do relatively more, and do it well.
Libertarians want the government to do considerably less, but presumably want it to do what is left well.
My preference is Democrat, Libertarian, Republican. I presume you would switch the first two…
Ironically, the only way we will get a more libertarian government is to the let the current government fix what Bush and Co. ruined. Once that happens, Republicans can be elected again and, hopefully, not muck it up like Bush.
May 17, 2010, 8:59 amByomtov says:
can we finally put to rest the inane (not to mention counter-factual) Krugman argument that the Bush Administration’s incompetence in handling Katrina was a result of the government being “run by a political party committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution?”
No. Because it’s neither inane nor counter-factual. And cronyism certainly can be a consequence of libertarian hostility to government. If you don’t think government does anything useful then why not put cronies in charge?
May 17, 2010, 9:00 amthirdeblue says:
Look at how bad government screwed up this oil thing! Can you imagine what would happen if we let the government run national defense, domestic security or even putting out fires?
Really, I don’t understand your point. The Bush administration bungled the Katrina response, so what? The moral is that the Bush administration should have done nothing at all?
If you have such a poor opinion of government why do you work for it? Last time I checked George Mason was a public university.
May 17, 2010, 9:01 amDr. K says:
Allen:
How convenient that you and your fellow travellers fail to grasp the following truths:
1) Due to states’ rights, the Federal Government could not go into LA until it was invited.
2) The Governor of LA at the time, did not request federal help until it was far too late. In case you forgot, she was a Democrat.
3) The mayor (another Democrat, BTW) of NO told people NOT to evacuate. Until it was too late. I remember the events clearly, as I was out of the country at the time, and was worried about getting home. Reports of the monster storm were on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox (and we all know how Fox can’t be trusted).
4) Here it is, going on 5 years after the fact, and NO is still not rebuilt. Same Democrat mayor.
So really, how did that whole Democrat controlled thing work for you?
May 17, 2010, 9:06 amHouston Lawyer says:
Anyone who was alive should remember that Katrina was not the only hurricane to hit hard during the Bush administration. As I recall, four powerful hurricanes hit Florida during this time period. Strangely, no one seems to remember that Floridians, with what help FEMA provided, handled these without a national melt down.
Yet, somehow, it has always been Bush’s fault that Louisiana was different.
Sure, what we need is another stupid government overreaction, like Sarbanes Oxley, by people who worship government.
May 17, 2010, 9:15 amStephen Lathrop says:
The best way to cut down on government incompetence is to vest all incompetence in the free market.
Please. Criticisms that the government can do nothing well, from people who want government to do nothing well—when you hear sounds like that, what can you say but, “libertarians.”
May 17, 2010, 9:21 amMidlantan says:
To paraphrase DB:
It seems an awful lot of DB’s arguments take this rough form. But in this case (as in many cases) DB’s premise is false. Government has not yet proved as incompetent in handling this oil spill as it did in handling Katrina. But if one examines the parts of government that have performed worst in/prior to the current oil spill, the leading candidate for least “competent” at this point (although I really don’t know what DB’s own criteria for government “competence” is) would be MMS – an agency dominated by players with the very attitude Krugman complains of.
You can complain that Krugman is wrong to ascribe this attitude only to the GOP, although I think most conservatives would agree – if not with the actual view that government is always the problem, at least that such a viewpoint is more common among conservatives. Liberals aren’t immune to capture by the industries they regulate, of course, and that can lead to the same sorts of harmful or incompetent (in)action when they are in power. But the attitude Krugman describes is one that is not only less resistant to such capture, but actually invites it.
May 17, 2010, 9:25 amShelbyC says:
You did, when you tried to distinguish the hurricane from the oil rig by saying, “What? Government didn’t run the oil rig.”
May 17, 2010, 9:28 amDavid Bernstein says:
The point of the post is simply that to the extent the government was incompetent during Katrina, it was not due to the Bush Administration’s (mythical) hostility to government, nor is the Obama Administration’s incompetence in managing the regulation of oil rigs (or underground mines, or whatever) a product of the Administration’s commitment to government activism. I tend to believe that more government leads to more incompetent government, but you don’t have to agree with that to agree with the more general point–that the flaws in how the respective administrations handled the relevant disasters had nothing to do with their attitudes toward government.
May 17, 2010, 9:38 amDavid Bernstein says:
I don’t think this follows, but the premise, that the Bush Administration was a hotbed of libertarian hostility to government, is laughable.
May 17, 2010, 9:40 amMark Buehner says:
Shouldn’t we be talking about who violated the regulations and how we are going to put them in jail? And which regulators failed to detect this, and fire them? And which politicians put the call in to have the regulators back off, and toss them out of office?
Naw- lets keep playing the same game of Republican V Democrat finger pointing instead of actually trying to make the system we have work in _some_ capacity. We currently have a horrific rent-seeking problem that easily transcends and eclipses ideological arguments.
Although I will note that once again, the inability of government to enforce its own mandates can apparently only be solved by more government.
May 17, 2010, 9:42 amDavid Bernstein says:
No, I said Krugman is wrong to think that there was anything resembling a hostility to government pervading the Bush Administration, which was the biggest spending and regulating administration since the 1960s.
May 17, 2010, 9:43 amAlan says:
@Bernstein: You are out of touch with reality here. The Bush administration was eviscerated during Katrina because it did not care. The Obama administration is demonstrating that it does care. You may equate caring to “government activism”, but no matter what label you put on it, that is what the vast majority of American’s want.
May 17, 2010, 9:45 amMark Buehner says:
They cared so much it took, what, 2 weeks before they got serious about it?
You see you can judge their care by their obvious displays of empathy, certainly not by their actions.
And, again, to get back to the point of the problem we have with corporate/government incest, I believe the excuse the Obama administration used for why they didn’t act more quickly is ‘BP told us everything was fine.’ Oh really?! So our governments idea of regulation is to ask the company in question if everything is ok or not. The fact that such a statement went unchallenged is astonishing, and shows how far down the road we are.
May 17, 2010, 9:49 amGordon Langston says:
Are any regulators going to lose their jobs over allowing BP to violate “industry accepted best practices.”? Let’s at least have them testify on the same day as BP execs so they can be held as accountable.
May 17, 2010, 9:49 amJerzLaw says:
I’m still waiting for Obama to say, “Fugate-y, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.”
May 17, 2010, 9:54 amPreferred Customer says:
I don’t find the ideological finger-pointing very interesting, but I think it’s pretty ridiculous to compare the response of “the government” in the two cases without distinguishing between what “the government” could be expected to do.
In the aftermath of Katrina, the complaint was that various existing resources that were designed to bring aid and security to displaced persons were not mobilized quickly enough. “The government” has the assets to do that (and, ultimately, did do that).
In the aftermath of the oil well spill, the complaint is that “the government” should do what, exactly? Send in the National Guard? Send in a carrier battle group to guard the oil slick? Send in some submarines to troll back and forth through the oil slick? “The government” doesn’t have assets in reserve that are particularly well suited to do anything about the oil slick, AFAIK.
This seems to me to be a tremendous false equivalence, no matter what your views are on the “proper” role of government.
May 17, 2010, 9:55 amAnderson says:
Dr. K, would you mind providing a few details (and links) to explain your 8:44 comment, as to what procedures were changed, when?
MMS, which appears to be deeply corrupt, made absurdly optimistic evaluations of deepwater oil spill potential “three times in 2007″ as well as granting BP a waiver for the Deepwater Horizon in 2009.
Apparently, the problem here is not “Democrats” or “Republicans.” It’s the capture of an agency by the entities it’s supposed to regulate.
As for DB’s utterly fact-free comparison of the Katrina aftermath to an oil spill, comment is superfluous.
May 17, 2010, 9:56 amDavid Bernstein says:
You are anthropomorphizing the government. If you are saying that the Obama administration is doing a better job at having its officials publicly express their concern, that’s arguable. If you are arguing that the Bushies didn’t really care about the people who lost their homes, died, etc., but the Obamaites really, really care about the fish, turtles, etc., you really need to take a break from partisan politics.
May 17, 2010, 9:57 amColin says:
You are mistaking intractability of a problem (BP oil rig) vs. incompetence and poor preparation (New Orleans). These are not comparable disasters.
Katrina was a matter of the government’s inability to get resources where they were needed.
BP requires engineering ingenuity of the first order.
Katrina required speed and diligence. BP requires genius. These are not the same.
May 17, 2010, 9:58 amSeaDrive says:
Generally speaking, big disasters don’t happen without multiple failures. The Federal Gov’t failed New Orleans because the levees failed, but that’s really secondary to the failures of the state and city. The Federal Gov’t failed to hold BP to a high enough standard, but BP was willing cut corners to save a quite small percentage of the overall drilling cost.
I think Bernsteins’s question is a good one, but I catch the whiff of an underlying assumption that non-government actors would have done better, just because they are non-government. That’s speculative.
May 17, 2010, 9:59 amJoe T. Guest says:
Or that Mississippi and Alabama, despite being hit extremely hard, received fewer resources and are recovering on their own…
There can be only one response to that in the all-knowing, all-wise blogosphere:
“Why does Bush hate white Republican people?”
May 17, 2010, 10:02 amAnderson says:
and regulating administration \
Ah yes, that 173-volume tome, Summary of Additional Restrictions Imposed by Federal Regulations, 2001-2009. I peruse it often.
No wonder the economy tanked under the burden of Republican micromanagement.
… Is it really too much, sometimes, to wish that someone who makes such a claim would have some sort of fact to back it up?
May 17, 2010, 10:03 amMark Buehner says:
Despite plan, not a single fire boom on hand on Gulf Coast at time of oil spill
Here’s another difference- immediately before and after Katrina, local Louisiana officials were saying everything was under control and they didn’t need help (or mobilize their own full resources). In this case, it was a corporation. Does a state waving off the Feds successfully bother you more than a company?
May 17, 2010, 10:05 amAnderson says:
Or that Mississippi and Alabama, despite being hit extremely hard, received fewer resources and are recovering on their own
I find it difficult to believe that the author of this comment has any familiarity with the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which was hit harder than NOLA was, and which is nowhere near recovered — despite having the advantage, which NOLA did not, of a well-connected Republican governor during a Republican administration.
May 17, 2010, 10:05 amDavid Bernstein says:
Anderson, I know you’re straining to disagree with me, but you actually agree.
May 17, 2010, 10:08 amAlan says:
@Bernstein: I am making a statement of fact about how the events were perceived. You are attempting to influence the perception. Which of us is practicing partisan politics? AFAICT, you have completely lost all credibility with this thread.
May 17, 2010, 10:09 amLugo says:
Indeed, the exact same hurricane (Katrina) hit Florida as hit NO. Yet Florida seemed to take it in stride. It’s almost as if there were some major difference in the nature of the population in the two areas that caused them to behave differently. Wonder what it could be?
Personally I would describe the Democrats as the ones want the government to do more, and then when increased government creates problems, prescribe more government as the solution. Isn’t the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results?
I would say Republicans want the government to be smaller, but are resigned to a government that is large and does a lot badly.
May 17, 2010, 10:10 amruuffles says:
Aside from the fact that LA and FL are hundreds of miles apart and thus receive different effects from the same hurricane (obviously the correct comparison would be two different hurricanes of the same strength, one hitting FL and one hitting LA), this is the most balant racist comment on VC, ever.
May 17, 2010, 10:13 amAnderson says:
local Louisiana officials were saying everything was under control and they didn’t need help
I don’t think anyone has suggested that the mayor, governor, or senators in question were competent, but for the sake of clarity, no, they weren’t. I don’t recall that anything improved in NOLA until the military showed up.
Local incompetence to handle such disasters is why we have federal emergency intervention in the first place.
And just to remind folks: what was truly shocking about Katrina was that, 4 years after 9/11, many of us imagined that the government had been putting some effort into rapid response to emergencies. We were rudely disappointed. What if that had been a small nuke or a biological-weapons attack instead of a hurricane?
It should not be rocket science for the USA to have stockpiles of water, rations, tents, for rapid deployment anywhere in the country where disaster strikes.
May 17, 2010, 10:14 amVoice of Reason says:
Wow, this is really something. I come to Volokh because, even though some of the contributors have significant ideological biases, they usually engage in intelligent or thought-provoking arguments. But this is neither; it’s partisan overreaching at its worst.
You don’t even need one day of law school to see factual distinctions between Katrina and the oil rig sufficient to render any meaningful comparisons irrelevant. And the fact that the commentariat here has overwhelming rejected the false equivalence in this post speaks volumes about the quality of its reasoning.
May 17, 2010, 10:15 amJasonF says:
You know, if you really want to comapre the Bush administration’s response to Katrina with a similar event during the Obama administration’s tenure, there is a major American city that flooded within the past few weeks. How has FEMA’s response to that been?
May 17, 2010, 10:16 amDavid Schwartz says:
Exactly. Rather than having the government say “you can take X amount of risk, and whatever goes wrong is somebody else’s problem”, have the government say “you can take pretty much any risk you want, but whatever goes wrong is 100% your problem”.
May 17, 2010, 10:18 amFloridan says:
SeaDrive: “. . . but I catch the whiff of an underlying assumption that non-government actors would have done better, just because they are non-government. That’s speculative.”
I’d say that’s delusional.
May 17, 2010, 10:19 amAnderson says:
It’s almost as if there were some major difference in the nature of the population in the two areas that caused them to behave differently.
Or, Mr. Racist Jerkwad, it *could* be that NOLA is below sea level, thus subject to disasters when levees breach.
New Orleans is basically a bowl that fills with water when it rains. Rainwater has to be pumped out. That’s why it’s at such risk from hurricanes.
Katrina was not “the big one” by any means. NOLA was on the weaker, western side of the storm (the Gulf Coast got the good part), and the storm was a Category 3 when it hit.
Which reminds me of another relevant difference between the FL and LA/MS landfalls:
Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005 and crossed southern Florida as a moderate Category 1 hurricane, causing some deaths and flooding there before strengthening rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm weakened before making its second landfall as a Category 3 storm on the morning of Monday, August 29 in southeast Louisiana.
May 17, 2010, 10:21 amMark Buehner says:
Really? Federal resources exist because we assume incompetence at a lower level? If that’s true, why should we assume competence at the national level? If history is any example, we shouldn’t.
I’m still not entirely clear on what the federal government could have done after the fact that would have made a decisive difference. Effectively evacuating before hand was the only clear decision that could have made a decisive difference. After that logistics in a ravaged and flooded region becomes a nightmare for anyone.
Is it rocket science to deploy your oil spill booms and other resources you’ve been planning to use since at least the Exxon spill? Is it rocket science not to take the word of a multi-national corporation on how serious a disaster is?
May 17, 2010, 10:22 amColin says:
Umm..no he’s not.
An administration is made up of people. Under Bush, these people demonstrated a lack of concern for NO. The people of the Obama administration have no shown a similar disdain.
As Sidney Morgenbasser said to BF Skinner: “Let me see if I understand your thesis. You’re saying that we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?”
May 17, 2010, 10:22 amAnderson says:
You don’t even need one day of law school to see factual distinctions between Katrina and the oil rig sufficient to render any meaningful comparisons irrelevant.
Evidently, being a law prof means you don’t actually have to know anything you were supposed to learn in law school.
May 17, 2010, 10:25 amColin says:
The poster you’re responding to wasn’t quite clear. Well, or he was being kind of silly. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the former.
A better way to say it is that such federal resources exist because some disasters are beyond the competance of local government. Largely due to issues like scale. Katrina was a disaster well above and beyond the capabilities and resources of the local government. They simply lack the tools to deal with something that bad/that big.
May 17, 2010, 10:27 amwill47 says:
I’m generally not a Jeb Bush fan, but I think he may deserve the credit for what Lugo seems to ascribe to racial/ethnic differences. With Katrina, there were things that federal and local governments failed to do — manage evacuations, evaluate the potential for disaster, prepare for the possibility of catastrophic flooding — that governments in other places and times have handled competently. So the question as to the BP disaster would be if another govt. (or another private company, for that matter) has ever handled a similar problem in a better fashion.
May 17, 2010, 10:28 amMark Buehner says:
Cite? That doesn’t sound exactly quantitative assessment. People tend to read in what they expect.
And how does Obama’s neglect of Nashville play into your drama?
May 17, 2010, 10:29 amDr. K says:
Happy to oblige:
The link to the Houston Chronicle:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/6990221.html
The money quote:
Now, while I am a Chemical Engineer, note that I AM NOT A DRILLING ENGINEER. I have been around the industry long enough to know that the safety proceducrs are there for a reason, and you had better have a dman good reason to change them. And even then, you have got to convince someone up the line.
There is no way this could have been done by a low level flunky. Someone in upper management had to be convinced and then HE had to convince the folks at MMS.
Here’s a link to the investigation of BP’s 2005 Texas City refinery explosion. Not a great safety record, to say the least.
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/SP/STAGING/local_assets/assets/pdfs/Baker_panel_report.pdf
May 17, 2010, 10:29 amLugo says:
The oil spill is a matter of the government’s inability to get resources (some kind of plug) where they are needed (the bottom of the ocean). You can bet that if Bush were in office while this happened, the press would be screaming about the administration’s incompetence, cronyism, and indebtedness to oil companies, not making excuses about intractable engineering problems.
Disaster relief logistics is a classic “intractable problem”, by the way.
May 17, 2010, 10:31 amColin says:
Basics of DB’s argument:
Look, I know you guys thought that those apples tasted really bad, and everyone assumed it was because the apples were rotten.
But look at these oranges! They also taste bad!
So maybe you should reevaluate. Doesn’t this prove that the apples weren’t rotten in the first place?
May 17, 2010, 10:32 amLugo says:
Yeah, that’s exactly what made them behave like animals, you betcha!
May 17, 2010, 10:36 amColin says:
No. The difference is that in this case, the resources don’t exist. As in they need to INVENT new resources to fix the problem. They need to come up with solutions that, prior to the problem, didn’t exist.
Katrina was a matter of applying existing and known resources.
We knew what to do for Katrina. We just did a piss poor job of actually putting it into action. In this case, we have no idea what to do. They are not the same sort of problem.
If you want to make the comparison, do it with Nashville. At least then it’s apples to apples.
May 17, 2010, 10:37 amrarango says:
There seems to me to be some serious misunderstanding about how the emergency management system operates–FEMA’s role is in the recovery phase, not the response phase–and whatever federal response is predicated on local authorities asking for federal assistance. You may want to check the National Response Framework,NIMS, and the incident command system for the operational details. An appropriate metric to gauge federal response is how fast the feds can respond to requests from local and state authorities. The Feds cannot force response activities on the locals. Northcom, except for its flamboyant CINC, did very little to accomplish anything of note except to garner press coverage.
The federal agency that did the best, IMO, was the USCG who were flying rescue missions shortly after landfall. Parish Sheriffs (and levee boards, locally controlled), the egregious mayor of NO, and the equally egregious governor of LA all bear more culpability than do the feds. But no one gets off scot free for the Katrina debacle.
May 17, 2010, 10:47 amDr. K says:
Colin:
You really don’t know what you are talking about, do you? Please just admit it and move on.
The resources and procedures for plugging a well are pretty standard. Somebody was rushing to save a few bucks. And it bit them in the ass. Now it’s a blame game.
Now, I am not telling people who know nothing to STFU. I am saying that people who don’t know what’s what ought to educate themselves before they start spewing crap.
BP fucked up. With the permission of a government agency. The same BP that gave many $$ to Democrats in general and Obama in particular.
I will play the game the left played all throught the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. BP got special treatment for donating to the elected officials and their appointed cronies. Where is the same level of outrage?
Note that the rig is not under the jurisdication of a state. It is in international waters. The Feds did not need permission to intervene. There are NO state’s rights issues here. The government did not enforce its own rules and took far to long to respond.
May 17, 2010, 10:48 amMark Buehner says:
The technology to contain and even plug an oil spill doesn’t exist? Really?
If that’s the case (and its not entirely true), we have an even bigger problem. The threat of an underwater oil spill has been a known quantity for decades. We know this because Democrats have been busy preventing new drilling because of this danger. Yet our vast federal government tasked with dealing with exactly such an eventuality didn’t have a plan? We have to rely on the (evil) oil company’s word on the extent of the damage AND how to contain/stop the leak?
I’m not putting that (largely) on Obama (although he’s had longer to deal with it than Bush had to prepare for 911 mind you). But that certainly speaks more to the ability of our bloated, corrupt, bought and paid for, over-bureaucratized government to screw things up and not be prepared for even likely disasters than anything else.
In other words, if you’re right, doesn’t it bother you that the government had no plan or ability to deal with a foreseeable disaster?
May 17, 2010, 10:50 amgeokstr says:
FIFY
May 17, 2010, 10:51 amrarango says:
Seems to me Dr K brings up the salient point–the BP disaster is in international waters. This is solely a federal responsibility–Cant blame Blanco, Nagin and other local officials in LA. The Obama administration owns this one.
May 17, 2010, 10:58 amrarango says:
The appropriate federal legislation acts applicable to disasters, are the Stafford Act, the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act.
May 17, 2010, 11:01 amPubliusFL says:
No, but the fact that both taste bad may suggest that all fruit tends to rot eventually, rather than that the apple is just a mean-spirited kind of fruit.
May 17, 2010, 11:03 amADS says:
As point of fact, the effort to stop the spill in a mostly private endeavor being carried out by BP engineers with government assistance. BP has a serious financial interest in stopping the leak, but have been unable to do so because of poor planning. The oil spill in the Gulf is nothing like Hurricane Katrina. Had the government seized the well and then took responsibility for all efforts to stop the leak, then we would be able to compare this to Katrina. Instead, we have a private interest whose failure to plan ahead when the full extent of the liability was easily known. How is this not demonstrative of the failure of libertarian theory of private industry acting responsibly in order to avoid liability?
May 17, 2010, 11:07 amMark Buehner says:
Doesn’t the fact that BP was allowed to bypass safety guidelines, and that the government relied (and trusted) entirely on their assessment and actions demonstrate the inability of the government to perform its regulatory functions as well as the inability to plan, resource, and execute disaster scenarios well within its scope, and well understood and anticipated?
I’ll say again- this is a failure of our current corporate/government partnering model more than any particular ideological failure. The only thing worse than a government hostile to business is a government looking to cozy up with (preferred) businesses.
May 17, 2010, 11:16 amJoseph Slater says:
David:
Are there other cases where you would reject the seemingly common-sense principle that it’s a problem for an institution — any institution — if the people running the institution generally reject the idea that the institution could accomplish much that is positive? Should law schools hire deans and law profs who generally think that law schools don’t and indeed can’t do much good for their students or for society? Should Joe’s Widgets hire as managers folks who think widget making is something between a waste of time and an actively bad thing?
I’m not suggesting that belief in an institution’s goals is sufficient for competency, but one would think it would usually be a pretty big plus, or more precisely, the lack of it would at least often be a pretty big minus.
Also, I’m not sure you’ve successfully rebutted Byomtov’s point that while cronyism and some pure, idealized version of libertarianism are not the same thing, one would certainly expect people who don’t want the government to regulate certain business interests effectively to appoint folks who share their lack of concern. That can lead to a couple of different things: cronyism is one; effective government regulation is not one.
May 17, 2010, 11:16 amMark Buehner says:
So what’s the excuse for the failure of regulation under those who champion regulation?
May 17, 2010, 11:18 amADS says:
If you are going to have regulation of industry, there needs to be a system of partnership between industry and regulators so that there is a more complete understanding of what the regulation should be and where industry will be able to take care of itself in order to avoid excessive regulation. MMS was an extreme example of regulatory capture and it was operated by corrupt persons. The failure for that goes up to the Secretary of the Interior and President Obama because the problems were exposed during the Bush Administration and efforts should have been made to clean it up.
However, with the possibility of truly crushing liability if things went wrong, why would BP itself want to bypass safety procedures? These are the types of actions that continue to prevent libertarianism from gaining sway in the general population. People do not trust large private interests to act in a way that does not try to cheat the customer and the nation. The argument should not be for or against regulation; regulation will never go away due to lack of trust in industry to act in a responsible way. The argument should be, how do we ensure that regulation occurs in a responsible manner that avoids industry capture and does not create excessive burdens on industry?
May 17, 2010, 11:31 amDavid Bernstein says:
Again, this doesn’t describe the Bush Administration and government, so it’s a counter-factual.
But accepting this hypothetical, it really depends. If someone is too enamored of an institution, they may very well overlook it’s flaws and weaknesses. Put someone in charge who is more skeptical, and they may run things much more efficiently. And if they think the institution can do some things well and other things not well, they may properly focus on the former.
Are Chavez and his people running their government well? Did the part that controlled Mexico for most of the 20th century run it well? They all “believed” in government, right?
May 17, 2010, 11:37 amMark Buehner says:
Which I understand. But why does the obvious companion to that question, ‘why has our federal regulation once again demonstrated catastrophic failure?’ and what should we do about it outside of the facile ‘more regulation’? This is similar to the housing crisis, there were laws on the books that should have prevented a lot of the practices that caused it, but you hear precious little about why they weren’t enforced. The obvious reason is that there are powerful industry and political players that are stifling that line of question, because they are hip deep (and joined at the hip) in bypassing regulations.
Exactly, I agree with that entirely. But here is where we do run into a pretty important ideological split. I believe that our current size and scope of government, with government involved so intimately in business and industry, actively works against actual and effective regulation. When everyone is pulling in the same direction because they are paying each other off, you just aren’t going to get good regulation.
Which to me means we need to reexamine the way our government interacts in the markets and with industry. Instead of a neutral arbiter, or even a active adversary, instead we have a ‘partnership’ that is very dangerous and indeed anti-capitalist. I’m not claiming to have all the answers, but I do know that the current idea of piling on more regulations that will be ignored by friends of friends is equivalent to piling mattresses on top of a pea. Even as a small l libertarian, I would prefer a more adversarial government. Ideally you would not need government oversight. When it is necessary it should be small, mean, even-handed and have sharp teeth.
May 17, 2010, 11:45 amJoseph Slater says:
David:
While the Bush admin. weren’t pure libertarians, they shared with libertarians an opposition to regulations of business that restricted the scope of power of those businesses to operate the way they wanted to operate.
Beyond that — and this is in response to Mark Buehner as well — I already said that thinking that government regulation could be a good thing is not sufficient to creating good, effective regulations. It’s just that not believing government regulation can be a good things seems like a pretty big obstacle to good, effective regulations.
So I don’t think you’ve made a real response to my question to you about folks leading institutions who don’t believe in the mission of the institution (law school deans who don’t think laws schools can do any good or widget company managers who think widget-making is a bad thing). Just saying the Bush admin were big spenders (which they were) and big regulators (which they weren’t in the sense Krugman means, although sometimes in the “agency capture” sense) doesn’t get at that.
May 17, 2010, 12:03 pmJerzLaw says:
The New and Improved Volokh.com! Now with pointless partisanship bickering!
My attempt at joking aside, I’m with you on this. The unfortunate and substantive change in blogging at volokh.com that you mention seems somewhat recent. Definitely not a fan. I now scroll past posts with tabloid-style headlines and content, preferring the more facially neutral posts that still define this site’s character. Fortunately, the tabloid-style posts like these are produced by a very limited number of contributors.
May 17, 2010, 12:06 pmMark Buehner says:
Isn’t the idea that anybody (Bush admin, etc) actually believes that regulation is impossible or entirely undesirable (as opposed to currently ineffective, which seems to me demonstrable) a total straw man?
Is there any actual documentation that anybody outside of the far reaches of the anarchist-libertarian fringe believes that no regulation is necessary or proper?
May 17, 2010, 12:12 pmAlyssa says:
I think DB’s point is just that an administration’s ideological “belief in government” is independent of that administration’s “competence.” Contra Krugman.
So all the ideologues here arguing whether Bush or Obama “care” or whether libertarians necessarily appoint “cronies” is neither here nor there.
May 17, 2010, 12:13 pmAlanW says:
I’m interested in the Nashville comparison. I didn’t follow that very closely, but it seems like it was a pretty big deal (albeit not Katrina big) that got short shrift in the national media. My impression is that the response (local and state) was pretty good – the problem was that the river was flooding, not that everyone was unprepared. Were there federal resources that should have been mobilized that were not? Was the response more poorly organized or implemented than I know? Did Obama take any sort of personal interest in the crisis? Should he have? None of these are rhetorical questions – I’m genuinely interested.
May 17, 2010, 12:18 pmDavid Bernstein says:
That’s like saying “while the Obama admin aren’t pure communists”. Actually, worse than that.
May 17, 2010, 12:36 pmDangermouse says:
Let me see if I understand this correctly…
For years, de-regulation has been the siren call of many on the right. We were told repeatedly that “yes, companies want safety and they will regulate themselves and the big invisible hand of the market will keep everything fair”. Thus, federal safety regulations stay up to date with the late 1970′s…
The BP rig didn’t have the necessary safety mechanisms installed to prevent a spill (unlike european rigs, which bound by the regulations of the EU, which is a big evil neoliberal institution). Presumably, BP was trying to save money…surprise! A business looking out for their bottom line, as they should.
The cognitive dissonance in this position is astounding. If you support the evisceration of regulatory mechanisms that -require- companies to take the necessary steps to prevent a catastrophic environmental disaster, you shouldn’t whine that the government didn’t do its job when a disaster occurs.
May 17, 2010, 12:50 pmDr. K says:
Dangermouse:
Regulations or not, BP was irresponsible for not having the proper safety mechanisms or reviews in place. However, they have a history of playing fast and loose with safety. Recall the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion.
However, if the Feds have taken the role of regulator, why didn’t they call BP on this and shut them down? Think campaign contibutions may have played a role? Or something else not exactly kosher? Where is the investigation of the federal government NOT doing its job? Or looking the other way for monetary (or other consideration)?
I never said that regulations should be removed. However, more regulations will not prevent a recurrance. Enforcement of existing regulations could have either prevented or mitigated the event. Adherance to basic premises of safety procedures could have prevented or mitigated the event.
Every company has a different “culture”. I worked for Mobil Chemical in the late 90s. The culture was one of safety first. You violated a safety rule, even to the point of not doing a thorough review before proceeding, and something went wrong, your ass was grass. If something did not go wrong, your ass could still be grass if management heard rumblings that procedures were violated.
Here the Feds (through MMS) had on-site oversight of the operation and agreed to violating a best practice. So how effective was the regulatory scheme?
By all rights, MMS should not have agreed to BP’s request. In fact, BP should not have requested the change in the first place.
Pure speculation, but BP senior management could have placed a call that resulted in MMS agreeing. If that were the case, how’s that regulatory thing working out for you proponents of bigger government?
May 17, 2010, 1:07 pmLN says:
Liberals tend to believe that government fails because the wrong people are in power, or the right people were not given enough power to do good. Libertarians tend to believe that government failure is a result of poor incentives and other structural problems that can sometimes be mitigated, but are always looming over government action.
Let’s be more accurate. In any society there are a variety of competing interests that often disagree. These interest groups have different commitments, different consistuencies, they have different degrees of power, different allies. The government is one of these interest groups. The government is led by politicians whose power depends on winning elections. Liberals have certain commitments and they believe that the government can help achieve these commitments.
Libertarians, on the other hand, are horrified of the idea of politics. It’s so messy, so arbitrary, so fundamentally unfair, so intrusive. They think that by assigning property rights and allowing free trade, society can achieve an optimal state through purely voluntary actions. Government, on the other hand, is fundamentally coercive.
In this post, Bernstein says that the critical difference between liberals and libertarians is that libertarians do not think that the Obama administration is a utopia. Rather than arguing against strawmen, why doesn’t Bernstein explain how a libertarian society would handle the problem of the current Gulf spill? If enlightened liberals in 2008 had decided to eliminate the government overnight and establish a libertarian country instead of electing Obama, how would we have handled the spill better? Serious question.
May 17, 2010, 1:18 pmAnderson says:
Buehner: I’ll say again– this is a failure of our current corporate/government partnering model more than any particular ideological failure.
We certainly agree there.
… Dr. K, your link and “money quote” don’t actually say that any normal procedures weren’t being followed … or am I missing something?
May 17, 2010, 1:28 pmRandy says:
Houston Lawyer: “Anyone who was alive should remember that Katrina was not the only hurricane to hit hard during the Bush administration. As I recall, four powerful hurricanes hit Florida during this time period. Strangely, no one seems to remember that Floridians, with what help FEMA provided, handled these without a national melt down.”
And anyone who was alive should remember that NO survived the hurricane fairly well. But it wasn’t the high winds that caused the damage — it was the surge of water that broke through the dikes from Lake Pontchartrain that caused the damage. The damage that remains today is because of the enormous flood, something that FL didn’t experience at all.
The causes of that flood are many, of course, not which of least was that congress refused to spend the billion or so that would have insured better dikes. So congress shares at least some of the blame.
May 17, 2010, 1:38 pmMark Buehner says:
Anybody got any thoughts on how to fix this problem aside from electing one party over the other (which wont help)?
Spitballing-
Term limits (politicians in office less have less time to get chummy).
Accountability- great word, but practically how? I would like to see some people at BP AND the Interior Dept run on a rail (potentially the coast guard as well, but how do you force that to happen? How do we force our government to enforce its own laws and meet out punishment on failures?
Politically- the one thing we absolutely must do is toss out as many incumbents as can be managed from both parties. The political culture of Washington makes the accountability issue impossible. There is a very good chance that some of our elected officials have a direct role in loosening up the regulators, but we’ll never know or see them punished because the only thing both parties agree on is protecting their own.
Finally- somehow I think we need to create an adversarial relationship between corporate interests and government. It beats the heck out of crony capitalism. But i don’t know exactly how to get their. Perhaps a bonus program for federal regulators to bring in scalps? As much as that would suck for business, in the long run its better than the cozyness that beats down competition and allows for these mega-expensive disasters.
May 17, 2010, 1:44 pmDr. K says:
Anderson:
As I said, I am not a Drilling Engineer, but I am a licensed PE (Chemical Engineer). Please note that while my response below is informed speculation, it is still speculation. What is most telling to me is the following:
This is a common problem with general news articles that are rewritten so that lay people can get a feel for it. I am sure lawyers see the same problem when the press writes about some of the technical details of the law.
OK, at a depth of 8000 ft, the pressure at the ocean floor is at least 250 atm (almost 4000 psi), assuming pure water at 68 F. We know that salt water is more dense than pure water and temperatures near the ocean floor are colder, so the density effects make the 250 atm a minimum pressure. Drilling mud is much more dense (probably about 3x pure water), so the pressure due to the column of mud is around 750 atm. So the math in the article is perhaps a bit off.
My understanding of the standard procedure is to sink a pipe through the mud to pump the concrete through to the bottom and allow it to set before removing the mud. The mud acts as a compress on the concrete and forces it to seal, preventing a blowout until the concrete is set. Once the concrete is set, the mud is pumped out.
My understanding is that to save time, BP asked MMS to alter the procedure to first remove the mud, then pour the concrete. This is the opposite of what is considered good practice. In addition, I understand that MMS agreed to this alteration. Why BP requested and MMS agreed has not been made clear.
May 17, 2010, 1:51 pmdr says:
Wow. I was kinda willing to give Lugo the benefit of the doubt ’til this comment. Nice, Lugo — thanks for being above-board with your racism!
May 17, 2010, 1:56 pmrpt says:
Are you kidding? Do you guys simply ignore the fact that BP, Transocean and Halliburton are PRIVATE companies who were running the operation? This is typical libertarian/conservative avoidance of private personal responsibility for grossly negligent conduct. We look forward to your support of the taxpayer bailout of BP because, after all, it was Obama’s fault.
May 17, 2010, 2:27 pmMark Buehner says:
I was under the impression that regulation and over-site was an ongoing federal program and responsibility? The fact that the regulators ignored their own rules and in fact gave this rig awards doesn’t mean anything? Whats the point of regulation if you don’t… regulate?
I don’t understand this reaction- you argue that this proves we need more regulation, but regulation we do have abjectly failed. Are you guys suggesting we reinforce failure by blindly piling on more regulation? Are you at all curious the names of the failure regulators? Do you care to see them hauled before a congressional committee and grilled liek the BP execs surely will be?
May 17, 2010, 2:32 pmDr. K says:
rpt:
No, I fully understand that BP, Haliburton, and Transocean are private companies. However, with the rig in international waters, disaster response is the duty of the Federal Government. Sure, the private companies had the obligation for first response, but once the leak got too big for them to handle, who has the duty?
Look at it this way. Every oil company keeps a fire brigades at their refineries as first responders in case of an on-site emergency. Does that relieve the state and local responders of their obligations?
May 17, 2010, 2:55 pmrpt says:
The failure of the regulated to act honestly, competently and in compliance with the regs is not the fault of the regulators. Where’s the concern for personal responsibility?
May 17, 2010, 2:58 pmMark Buehner says:
Wow. Really? What are we, on the honor system? I just spent 8 years hearing about how Halliburton and the oil companies are the devil, and the best you got it ‘they told us they were following the rules’.
Doesn’t exactly install a lot of confidence in whatever you have in mind to prevent this in the future. Perhaps some sort of pinkie swear?
And btw- didn’t BP get a dispensation from the regulators that let them avoid avoid the rules? Care to address that?
May 17, 2010, 3:12 pmrpt says:
Yes, BP is corrupt and the people at MMS during the Bush-Cheny administration who have not been cleaned out are corrupt. Pretty simple.
May 17, 2010, 3:32 pmMark Buehner says:
Step away from the koolaid.
May 17, 2010, 3:35 pmDavid Bernstein says:
No, I said that the critical difference is that libertarians think that “government failure” is not due to having the “wrong people” with the wrong tools in power, but is a reflection of some inherent problems with government itself. As another commenter pointed out, sometimes you can’t do without government, and you make do the best you can. And as I’ve pointed out, the less government does, the easier it is to monitor it, so less government MAY lead to better government, but I think that depends on many additional factors. What libertarians certainly don’t agree with is that (a) per Krugman, that putting liberals dedicated to activist government in charge will have any meaningful or predictable effect on government failure; and (b) that the Bush Administration was composed of libertarians who opposed activist government.
May 17, 2010, 3:35 pmDr. K says:
No chance that people at MMS who are Obama appointees could possibly be corrupt?
May 17, 2010, 3:36 pmHelpHaiti says:
PreferredCustomer is absolutely correct about this. Mr. Bernstein is so eager to point a finger at the Democratic administration that he is willing to disingenuously equate the post-Katrina response to this oil spill. Following Katrina, many Americans were critical of the Bush administration for failing to place an immediate emphasis on doing very basic things like getting water and food to dying people. Following the oil spill, what can the federal goverment be asked to do — instantly learn cutting edge engineering techniques to stop an oil leak one mile underwater?
Had this oil spill occurred during the Bush administration, I doubt that anybody would be criticizing it for not doing more to get the leak stopped. That can only be done by the expert engineers who work for BP and the affected companies.
May 17, 2010, 3:36 pmMark Buehner says:
This is getting ridiculous. What exactly do we pay these agencies for? ‘Asking’ corporations if they are following rules, ‘asking’ them if the situation is serious, and then not knowing anything about disaster management of a danger we’ve known about for decades? Sorry friend, if the govment didn’t give any thought to how theyd handle an oilspill, they’ve got yet another big problem to answer for. But the truth is this ISNT a surprise, there WERE plans in place, and they WEREN’T followed through on. Apparently they were neglected because this agency took BP at their word instead of seeing for themselves- more embarrassingly it took amateurs looking at online satellite photos to detect the size of the spill!
That’s the funniest thing i’ve heard all day.
Look- you’ve got two choices. Either the regulatory agency screwed up- or they didn’t screw up and they are useless. Pick one.
May 17, 2010, 3:45 pmDr. K says:
HelpHaiti:
Yes, you are correct that the people best suited to plug the leak are BP.
However, when it was apparrent that a disaster was in progress, why was there almost 9 days before the Obama administration made any effort to begin containment? Oil slicks don’t just get smaller as time goes by.
I also think you should recalibrate your comment:
The left would have been calling for investigations of the Bush Admnistration 5 minutes after disaster struck.
May 17, 2010, 3:45 pmLN says:
No, I said that the critical difference is that libertarians think that “government failure” is not due to having the “wrong people” with the wrong tools in power, but is a reflection of some inherent problems with government itself.
But this is like saying “the problem isn’t that the people in power are bad, the problem is that people in general are inherently bad.” This may sound wise but it’s compeltely useless. I’m a liberal and I’m quite aware that government is not exempt from the agency problems that plague our entire society (that in fact plague any complex society). But so what? You’re saying we should have “smaller” government? How exactly would smaller government have helped here? That’s pretty hard to explain, so you’ll just say that government sucks no matter who makes up the government.
So you’re a fatalist when it comes to government. Apparently no matter what people think and believe, it is impossible for the government to regulate oil companies properly. I wonder what else you are fatalistic about. Is it possible for the government to regulate guns correctly? Is it possible for the government to regulate speech correctly? Is it possible for the government to have an appropriate foreign policy with regards to Israel? Should voters who care about these issues care about who exactly holds power in the American government, or will all politicians naturally converge to the same views based on some corrupt but deterministic process?
Let’s face it, there’s no private free-market libertarian paradise approach — much less a libertarian solution — to the Gulf spill problem. So I guess now we have to pretend that libertarians believe that government is flawed while everyone else thinks that the government would be perfect if their guys were in charge. That way, libertarians still have some moral/intellectual high ground.
May 17, 2010, 4:09 pmDr. K says:
LN:
I’d rather have 5 people who know their stuff and do their job competently than 5000 who don’t know squat.
If the government can’t NOT do it’s job, shouldn’t it be able to do it for LESS?
May 17, 2010, 4:34 pmDr. K says:
OK, seems the editor does not work properly.
the quote should read:
“If the government can NOT do it’s job, shouldn’t it be able to NOT do it for LESS”
And it seems so, as the person in charge of the MMS Program with direct responsibility is resigning at the end of the month:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/17/interior-departments-oil-gas-official-quits-wake-gulf-oil-spill/
May 17, 2010, 4:42 pmVoice of Reason says:
Apparently not, as evidenced by BP’s series of failed attempts to plug it.
I think it’s fair to say that prior to this leak, conventional wisdom was that oil is so precious and so valuable (given the wild fluctuations in oil prices that would occur whenever the mildest threat of a hurricane appeared in the Gulf), that surely a spill of this magnitude could never happen.
A reasonable person might look at this situation and think that BP’s inability to plug the leak reflects what we previously thought was an impossible failure of private industry. Only the blindest of ideologues could look at this situation and think the government is to blame, let alone to blame on the same order of magnitude as our incompetent response to the flooding in New Orleans.
This is a sad reflection on the state of our political discourse. At the moment, the right seems hellbent to turn every disaster not only into a failure of the Obama administration but one so egregious as to trump even the worst of the Bush administration, no matter how incongruous the facts may be.
As others have voiced, I too would be interested in hearing some actual facts about the recovery in Nashville. I see Mr. Bernstein has updated his original post to conflate Nashville with New Orleans despite, as far as I can see, any single fact to support the comparison. I know the extent of property damage in Nashville was devastating, but I’m assuming if there were a lack of food and shelter, collapsed or impassible transit, or dead bodies floating in the streets, surely someone from Fox News would’ve gone down there to cover “Obama’s Katrina.”
May 17, 2010, 5:33 pmKenneth Almquist says:
Dr. K:
According to the article you link to, BP poured in cement, allowed it to set, and then began to remove the mud, with the intention of replacing the removed mud with additional cement. That seems to contradict your understanding of what happened.
This is not to defend MMS, which until recently was accepting prostitutes and illicit drugs from the companies it was supposed to be regulating. Obama is responsible for changing the culture of the agency to one where people are actually expected to their jobs properly, but changing the culture of a large organization is not easy, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Obama has not yet succeeded.
May 17, 2010, 5:55 pmkdackson says:
Kenneth:
You may be correct. However, it does not make sense. BP was going to remove the riser. Why pour an 8000 ft long 20″ (or so diameter) column of concrete (not reinforced) without being able to pull the riser out?
There is some question on whether the plug was set sufficiently or whether there was sufficient concrete to form an adequate plug.
As I stated, this is outside of my direct experience. However, it seems that something was done incorrectly and not according to good practice. That is typically the root cause of all accidents in engineering.
May 17, 2010, 6:06 pmElliot says:
So, can we say well intentioned failure is success? It’s all about feelings?
May 17, 2010, 6:11 pmSeaDrive says:
“Now that the Government has Proved as Incompetent”
Is that the title you meant?
May 17, 2010, 6:38 pmDavid Schwartz says:
I feel the need to point out that until we know what went wrong in this disaster, we really are only speculating that it was due to a systemic problem of any kind. It may be that BP, regulators, and others involved struck a fairly rational and reasonable balance between safety and economy and a disaster of this magnitude every 50 years or so is the price for undersea oil extraction.
That doesn’t mean we can’t learn from every disaster and make things safer and better. But it means that you often can’t predict what will go wrong until it does.
May 17, 2010, 7:55 pmkdackson says:
David:
Respectfully: BS.
I have learned from my 20+ years in the industry that you NEVER balance safety and economy. If it ain’t safe, you don’t do it.
End of story.
It’s a different issue if you take all the precautions and something unforseen goes wrong. You learn from that to make sure you never make the same mistake twice.
May 17, 2010, 8:07 pmBrianMac says:
I’m unsure whether that’s parody, delusion, or rhetoric. Hell, maybe you pulled off the trifecta.
May 17, 2010, 8:22 pmrpt says:
Name one MMS employee appointed by the current administration involved in this disaster. Please stick to the facts, not ideology.
May 17, 2010, 8:45 pmrpt says:
It’s prudence; unfortunately out of fashion.
May 17, 2010, 8:47 pmleo marvin says:
Even if the risk exceeds your assets?
May 17, 2010, 9:31 pmMidlantan says:
Well, that’s not actually what you wrote, but if that’s indeed what you meant, then I agree with you that the Bush Administration was “the biggest spending and regulating administration since the 1960s” (or certainly close to it). But that doesn’t really say anything about whether “hostility to government” pervaded that same Administration. Hostility to government was a pervasive Bush administration talking point in general, but the way it worked in practice was that that hostility got put into practice in certain classes of regulation, while other classes of regulation increased. You’re not suggesting politicians and political appointees aren’t capable of hypocrisy, are you?
I didn’t think so, and that seems to be the flaw in a theory that amounts to “Krugman is wrong because his theory would mean that politicians said one thing and then did another.”
May 17, 2010, 9:53 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I doubt you can even give one example of a Bush Administration official expressing hostility to government.
May 17, 2010, 9:55 pmbishop says:
“Now that the Government has Proved as Incompetent in first not preventing and then managing a man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as it proved in managing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,”
Assuming this post is not intended to be a satire of Fox News talking point ….
Perhaps you should consider that the technical challenges involved in capping a deep-sea oil well are somewhat more daunting than, say, loading up a few dozen helicopters with loads of medical supplies and clean drinking water to airlift them into people stranded by floodwaters.
Also, I don’t know whether you consider yourself a libertarian or a conservative, but many people who do would say that it is a proper use of government power to respond to a large scale disaster that has killed people and endangered tens if not hundreds of thousands while, on the other hand, perhaps private enterprise should be responsible for solving its own oil-spills.
May 17, 2010, 10:24 pmkdackson says:
Please try to remember that 11 people died because of that decision.
I sure as hell would not want that on my head.
But I guess you don’t work in an industry where people might die because someone tried to save a few bucks.
May 17, 2010, 11:01 pmkdackson says:
I am only forwarding a possibility. MMS was corrupt. Note the current head of the MMS who was a career man with 30+ years and head of the division responsible has resigned.
And he reported to the Secretary of the Interior.
Obama appointed him, didn’t he?
May 17, 2010, 11:05 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Yep, so long as you have adequate insurance. No, if you don’t. (This is perfectly consistent with Libertarian beliefs, unless you’re one of the wackos who thinks mentally ill people should be permitted to build their own nuclear weapons.) That you can make any failure 100% (or nearly so) your problem is the requirement.
May 17, 2010, 11:44 pmGrover Gardner says:
Can you name some names? The current director was promoted to that position in 2007.
Wait, let me get my blackboard out and we can draw a chart…
May 18, 2010, 1:02 amArthurize says:
Oh yes…a few dozen helicopters with water and medical supplies would have done a lot…not. But while we’re on the subject, having water and medical supplies, as well as port-o-lets, in the damned places you direct your own citizens to go for shelter… a job that requires the feds?No problem arranging toilets for hundreds of thousands at JazzFest. Maybe, just maybe, our damned fool mayor and damned fool governor could have handled that even before the storm hit? Give me a break; 48 hrs. before Katrina hit it was headed to the Fla. panhandle. We should just have the military buzzing around from Brownsville, Tx. to Miami and all the way up the eastern seaboard because who knows where a storm is going to land?. Mr. Bernstein, your point is well taken; if anything, an oil well environmental catastrophe is something the federal gov’t should be much more equipped to address than a hurricane.
May 18, 2010, 1:11 amBrianMac says:
No, but I live in a world where trade-offs between wealth and health, and between risk and risk, are inescapable. You can pretend that it’s not the case in your particular industry, but at least be aware that it’s a pretence.
May 18, 2010, 4:04 amkdackson says:
Then I would not want to work either for you or with you. That is not a pretense, that’s a fact of life in the chemical industry. See, I work in a field where if you violate a safety rule, you are out of a job. And good luck finding another one. Period. No appeal. Even if you are union. Because people’s lives are on the line. Must be nice to live in a safe academic world where issues of life and death are hypothetical thought exercises and everything comes down to a profit calculation. Hell, even the Chinese are learning the lesson. And that’s saying a lot.
Yes, there are tradeoffs, but we have engineering codes, regulations, and requirements for a reason. And that reason is that people have died because we either didn’t know or skirted the rules.
Damn, I’m starting to sound like a liberal.
May 18, 2010, 6:44 amMark Field says:
C’mon in — the water’s fine.
May 18, 2010, 10:16 amElliot says:
We are blessed with many people who know nothing of various industries, but their overwhelming intelligence allows them to see what others can’t. Just ask them.
May 18, 2010, 11:11 amMark Buehner says:
Apparently the game is, unless you can prove otherwise, everyone involved in this mess was a Bush appointee. Ohhhhh k. As if the ‘This is Bush’s Fault’ meme isn’t pathetic enough on its face.
May 18, 2010, 1:29 pmdcp says:
I’m more aggravated with the mainstream media than I am with any of these b.s. political philosophy arguments.
I don’t blame any individual politician when a natural or industrial disaster happens. But I also don’t think any of them are beyond some constructive criticism at an appropriate time and place for any preemptive regulatory measures or post-event recovery efforts that didn’t measure up to our collective expectations. I mean there has to be at least some minimal level of competence and accountability for these sorts of things.
The problem is, I don’t see how we can ever arrive at an objective consensus on such a standard with (hopefully) pragmatic benefits when the all-powerful media blatantly uses these disasters as political footballs. It just poisons the well.
Can you imagine how this story would be spun if Bush was president during this oil spill? But, oops, Obama is charge now. And double oops, his administration just announced a plan to open up the eastern coast to a massive drilling plan. And we can pretty much play that compare and contrast game with anything that happens on his respective watch.
How sad is it that Sean Penn (an actor and outright buffoon) is the only voice out there screaming that the country of Haiti was destroyed by an earthquake and the people are now rotting in a complete state of hopelessness and preventable disease? How sad is it that Jon Stewart (a comedian and borderline buffoon) was the only voice pointing out that a major metropolitan area (Nashville) was completely flooded on a disastrous level and hey, where’s the alarm, where’s the action, where’s the coverage?
May 18, 2010, 4:57 pmzuch says:
Prof. Bernstein:
Leaving aside the role of the MMS inherited from Dubya (and the permits and industry coziness inherited from Dubya), why is it the role of the gummint to spend lots to prepare to clean up nasty spills caused by oil companies? Yes, they ought to have some facilities, but why do you assume that it is the proper role of the gummint to stand by to wipe industry’s butt after industry takes a noisome sh*te?
And that’s not mentioning the considerable role in rounding up and co-ordinating the deployment of booms and dredges and such which such as the USCG have done. This, of course, is quite different from the role of, say, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in maintaining floodwalls, etc.….
What they are not in the business of doing is being the Red Adairs of the world, and actually stopping the oil leak … an oil leak that, as others have pointed out above, was not an “act of god” (despite the claims of some Republicans to that effect), but rather the predictable result of horrible (mis)management and ignoring of established standards of care in drilling by the oil companies, long coddled by the Dubya maladministration. It’s the responsibility of the oil companies both to take measures to prevent disasters, and to fix (when things go wrong) their own mistakes. It’s the responsibility of government to hold them to this, and to punish them when they fail.
Cheers,
May 18, 2010, 11:00 pmGrover Gardner says:
Someone suggested that perhaps these were Obama appointees. I suggested he name some names. He hasn’t. Can you?
May 18, 2010, 11:01 pmzuch says:
Prof. Bernstein:
What’s the “poor incentives” here? Should the companies have been on the hook for $10+B in damages to encourage their due care and diligence?
If we’d banned offshore drilling, that would have prevented this tragedy. Why do you say that such was not a valid approach? Hell, the Europeans (Norway, etc.) have already pointed out that had even just their standards been in effect, this disaster would not have happened. How can you say that such is not “working”? Why is this a failure in government?, except in showing the perils of having the oil companies shag the MMS and writing their own ‘regulations’, the way we’ve been doing things here?
How would a libertarian “small government” approach have done anything to prevent this?
Cheers,
May 18, 2010, 11:11 pmzuch says:
Did God run the oil rig?
Cheers,
May 18, 2010, 11:15 pmzuch says:
This is just disjointed, if not incoherent thinking.
First, you confuse stricter and laxer regulations with more or less gummint. Not necessarily so.
Secondly, you lump all gummint into a big bag, and don’t consider the actual problem at hand here. Outside of overall budget constraints, there’s no obvious reason that a gummint that does more will do everything more poorly (and you provide no evidence that a smaller gummint does less things well … if that’s even a good idea, which is not obvious in the least). One thing is for sure: The idea that “smaller is better” is more a matter of faith with you than an actual established fact. Particularly so when you have provided no alternatives that you think might have done things better here. If you had to pick one thing to attack “big gummint” from a “libertarian” standpoint, I suspect you couldn’t have done worse than pick this example (the BP spill). Maybe you ought to have gummint pick your next arguments for you.
Cheers,
May 18, 2010, 11:28 pmElliot says:
The president is responsible for all appointees. If he appointed them, then they are his. If he didn’t, and after sixteen months he has left them in office, he is responsible.
But, that brings up a technical personnel question. Suppose Reagan appointed some official, and suppose that official is still in his position. If the official does not resign, does he have to be reappointed by successive presidents? If successive presidents do nothing, does the official just coast from one administration to another? Do presidential appointments have a sunset provision? (Yes, I have obviously never worked for the government.)
May 18, 2010, 11:29 pmElliot says:
That would imply the Europeans know the details of what happened, why it happened, what transpired at the well head, and exactly how it could have been prevented. Can you tell us those details?
May 18, 2010, 11:37 pmzuch says:
They had the freakin’ oil companies write the energy policy, had their business buddies try to “rebuild” Iraq, build formaldehyde-soaked trailers for NOLA refugees, etc., etc.. They tried to gut environmental laws and auction off federal property for a song and a dance. They luvved them some gummint that could hand them all the marbles.
The difference between a libertarian and a Republican is whether the check’s been cashed that bought the gummint (disclaimer: Democrats can be as venal as Republicans on these types of things, and this will never change until we have public campaign financing and get rid of the idea that corporations are people too).
Cheers,
May 18, 2010, 11:47 pmzuch says:
How many parts of Florida were under sea level and protected by levees?
Did the hurricane hit the poor parts of Miami (with poor transportation capacity) and flood it?
Cheers,
May 18, 2010, 11:58 pmzuch says:
The police officers?
But you seem to think that the biggest problem is NOLA was sporadic violence (from whomever). It wasn’t. It was that nearly the whole damn city was flooded, and no one managed to get evacuation (or rescue) plans working … and that the gummint sat on its hands for four years afterwards and didn’t do anything to rebuild.
Cheers,
May 19, 2010, 12:17 amian says:
This whole thread is a load of crap. “I believe this…” “I believe that…” Libertarianism is a bullshit belief system, promoted by egotists impressing themselves with their fatuous critiques of other people’s motives and topped of with a smug cynicism which accomplishes nothing.
June 13, 2010, 11:26 pm