I have been enjoying the anti-government Glibertarian response to the fact that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is going to turn most of the northern Gulf of Mexico into a stinking festering dead zone for a generation, destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people in the process as well as killing those men who died when the rig exploded. Here is the totality of their response...
...Wait. That was it? Uhm, yeah. The silence from the magic unicorn universe Libertarian crowd, who insist that the magic free market fairy would, like, just magically make oil rigs not explode, has been deafening, eh?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Love that term. Not so sure that the Gulf of Mexico wasn't already on it's way to becoming a dead zone (due to petroleum based products) before the spill though. That does not mean I'm excusing the latest corporate screw up from culpability.
ReplyDeleteI'll provide some Glibbo solutions for them!
ReplyDeleteAllow the free market to work by encouraging entrepreneurs to "mine the oceans"! If people on those now-useless fishing boats can innovate a way to suck up oil from the massive undersea plumes, then they can sell it while they clean the seas! The free market solves the pollution problem!!!!
Or if BP is forced to clean its mess by onerous government regulations, it should offer to pay private businessmen $500 for every barrel of oil they strain from the seawater. Then, when they've got a bunch of folks hooked on doing it like that, put the price up for bids. Somebody would do it for $450! They've already invested in the technology to do so (which will magically be invented in response to the $500/barrel incentive) and they need to pay back the bank loan (which banks were oh so willing to provide for an untested technology in an uncertain market). Then $400! And through the magic of the market, soon people will be cleaning the seas for subsistence wages, and BP will profit by selling the oil these hydrocarbon fishermen provide.
See, Tux? I can think like a Glibbering idiot. Took me maybe 30 seconds. Why are these people so slow at it? Maybe they're embarrassed at what their deregulation hath wrought?
(Penguin face palm) I forgot, Ayn Rand was fond of creating inventions that violated the laws of physics and saying that the only reason we didn't have them was because evil Government was suppressing them. What was her biggie, a perpetual motion machine that created unlimited energy out of the "ether"? So of *course* if it wasn't for evil Government (which, remember, is We The People in a democracy, no matter how willfully ignorant, bigoted, and stupid We The People are) someone would just magically invent some device out of thin air to solve this problem. How could I be so *dumb* not to see that Glibertarian retort!
ReplyDeleteOf course, as an actual engineer who actually has designed and manufactured things (yes, I've been an actual manufacturing engineer, designing the processes and procedures used to actually build stuff), I start breaking up in hopeless laughter at this point, because last time I created a new product it took over two years to get it into production starting from a clean sheet of paper to the first machines rolling off the end of the assembly line (on carts, not physically rolling off the end of the roller tables, duh!), but hey. I'm into what's real, and Glibertarians are into universes with unicorns and cotton candy trees and perpetual motion machines. I should be ashamed of myself for imposing my un-American values of "science" and "engineering" upon their fantasies!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
God Damn! those laws of thermodynamics anyway.
ReplyDelete