Reply #45: You are both compeltely wrong. This catastrophe was ultimately caused, not by

[Joe Chi Minh]

the selfless desire of BP to service mankinds needs for fuel, plastics, etc. The wellspring of it all was NOTHING other than greed. It was the mother and father of all the other subsidiary causes, such as technological hubris, deploying trail-blazing technology, even, it seems, the very mandating of cretinous behaviour in extremis, from on high, to those lower down the chain.

Our dependency on oil is the reason for the ongoing search for new sources of oil. It was NOT the cause of this catastrophe, even remotely. There is no excuse whatsoever for having pushed the frontiers of the use of the technology so recklessly far, so quickly. The problem of trying to stop a gusher at such a depth must have occurred to them, but the big guys must have chosen to press on. Still, if the precautionary principle is ignored in relation to the very food you eat, why should they have acted more responsibly? Because profit is king. Ask Milton Friedman's ghost.

Adam Smith thought much the same of the merchants of his day as did Einstein, of his - and by extension, of their technological myrmidons. "Technological progress", he observed, "is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal".

Smith warned that businessmen were endemic malefactors, and consequently needed to be virtually 'tagged':
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

His Hidden Hand was nothing other than the synergies created by a beneficent Providence in furtherance of the common good, ensuing upon grace being allowed to build upon nature, an old Christian axiom. Don't lock up the businessmen. Use them, as you would a beast of burden. No need for factory-farming, though, just so long as the herdsmen do their job. Which they haven't, of course; hence the oil gusher and so much else. Smith's message has been twisted by ultra right-wing capitalists out of all recognition.

Smith's maxim: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind," bears repeating, here.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/23/4046

There must be many good, individual business people, of course, but they are forced to work under a depraved capitalist system, which deliberately incites unbridled covetousness and ravages the planet, animal, vegetable and mineral.