The Gulf and Our Oily Campaign-Finance System

[Jefferson23]

June 16, 8:51 AM, 2010

By John R. MacArthur

As the BP oil spill continues to flood the Gulf of Mexico, I find myself asking if such an environmental catastrophe might constitute the sort of “creative destruction” that right-wing market fundamentalists love to cite when they defend “free markets” and capitalism.

Creative destruction is the term coined in 1942 by the brilliant Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe certain not-so-benign effects of the market system, and the right wing has clung to the concept ever since. In the right’s oversimplified version of Schumpeter’s idea, capitalists function as something akin to artists who must not be restrained by governments lest they lose their creative verve and nerve. Of course, such unregulated enthusiasm will from time to time lead to the destruction of old-fashioned, cherished ways of life and work. But these trades and practices were headed for the ash heap anyway, and from this “industrial mutation,” as Schumpeter put it, will arise, well . . . something wonderful.

So far, however, I can’t seem to find the good, creative or otherwise, in the tide of petroleum now well on its way to suffocating the Gulf and its surrounding coastline. While waiting for the good news, I have to content myself with trying to understand the bad.

For one thing, none of what has happened over the past month — the absurd obfuscations by BP and the federal government, the lack of a plan to address the disaster, the so-far toothless denunciations of “big oil” — should surprise anyone. The corruption of the bureaucrats assigned to “regulate” oil drilling on public lands is an old story dating back to the Teapot Dome scandal, in the early 1920s, when Albert Fall, Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior, took bribes from oilmen in exchange for granting them leases without competitive bidding. As Brian Urstadt explained last year in Harper’s Magazine, the descendants of Fall at the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service were, as Annie Oakley sang in “Annie Get Your Gun,” just “doing what comes naturally.”

in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/06/hbc-90007240