Sad: in a numbskull post, "libertarian" Ron Bailey touts cost-benefit analysis as justification for offshore oil drilling, ignores issues of who benefits, who loses & who decides
Given the dearth of sensible libertarian commentary at LvMI on the ongoing Gulf of Mexico disaster, I thought I’d see if Reason Online’s science reporter Ron Bailey had anything useful to say. (I’ve occasionally found Bailey’s comments useful and have discussed them a number of times here.)
I found one post by Ron in early May, and came away pretty appalled at an analysis that was not in the least libertarian, and could easily have been a PR piece from a petroleum industry front group (like the “think tanks” and “free-market” energy blog of self-professed libertarian and professional rent-seeker Rob Bradley).
Ron’s post? “Weighing the Benefits & Costs of Offshore Drilling; Offshore drilling remains a risk well worth taking, even in the wake of the oil spill disaster”. The title alone largely makes my points, so I don’t see any need to excerpt from it here. But let me just note that I found Ron’s complete failure to even raise issues of incentives, moral hazard, failure of government management of commons resources and lack of any rights for affected fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers and other resource users to be extremely disappointing and puzzling.
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