TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

Is it too much to ask to have a little more light of Austrian analysis thrown on BP? I’ve asked Lew Rockwell and Stephan Kinsella not simply about the moral calculus that leads them to assert that BP is the biggest victim of its own decisions that produced the Gulf oil gusher, but also whether it makes sense to speak of a massive corporation as if it is in any way a “person” similar to those living breathing individuals its action have harmed and continue to harm.

Where, in a week when BP CEO Tony Hayward (after Senator Joe Barton first apologizes to him for a “shakedown” of BP by President Obama) is off watching a yacht race, is the focus of Austrians on real people – and how the state-given corporate entity status affects human behavior WITHIN the corporation, as well as the behavior of the “corporation” to others? Maybe the issues raised are just too insignificant or mundane? But hey, as Stephan has just noted to me in a dull, cursory comment:

“what do you expect us to say? this is just a tort. Torts happen”!

Confused nonsense, I say. “Torts “happen”? Balderdash – PEOPLE violate the rights of others (commit torts).  Did this tort  “happen” to our chief victim, BP, too?

It is one of the salient features of corporations that they confuse themselves and everyone else as to WHO, precisely, is responsible for their actions and the harms they cause others, and it is time for Austrians to examine such features closely.

All of this is prelude to the following by Jim Hightower that highlights the behavior of BP and its CEO:

Jim Hightower,  BP Is a Corporate Criminal; BP has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety records in the industry.  (AlterNet, June  17):

Gosh, how quickly things turn. One day, you’re a strutting peacock — the next day, you’re just another gasping, oil-covered bird.

In early April, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for “Beyond Petroleum.”

Since its Gulf of Mexico well blew out on April 20, however, BP has proven to be beyond belief. The wider and deeper that this catastrophe spreads, the more we discover just how oily this giant is.

From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.

And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant’s current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities. In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as “egregious” and “willful.” In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.

While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could’ve foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control. Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what’s delicately called a major “petroleum release” in the Gulf of Mexico.

“What the hell did we do to deserve this?” Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you’re not the victim here — and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP’s reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.

“It wasn’t our accident,” the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an “accident,” but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP’s executive suite.

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP’s mess was fast becoming America’s worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well “is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.

Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would’ve been put behind bars long ago — if not on death row.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, “Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.” (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly “Hightower Lowdown,” co-edited by Phillip Frazer.

These observations are similar to those of Bruce Dixon, who noted:

Ultimately, people woke up, rose up, and revoked those privileges. How long will it be before we revoke the lawless privileges of corporations, before we limit their immunity, curtail their immortality, and rein in their immorality?. How long can we, and the planet on which we depend for life itself, wait? Is there every a line that cannot be crossed? Where is it? What will it take?When it suits their purposes, employees and mouthpieces of various transnational firms hasten to assure us that “corporations are people too.” In a sense this is certainly true. Despite what some bible thumping fundamentalists will tell you, corporations were not ordained by the Almighty. Corporations are legal fictions. They are artificial shields under which we agree to allow a handful of extremely wealthy people to rule over the rest us, and plunder the planet and its people at will, just as centuries ago most of the humans who mattered agreed that kings, queens and nobly born, the “people of quality” had the god given right to ride roughshod over humanity.

The gaps between (i) Austrian insistence that we focus on individual rights and plan formation, (ii) the penchant of some (many!) libertarians to support corporations while bashing citizens groups which are unhappy with the impacts of corporate actions on others, and (iii) the real world where corporate misbehavior is large and spinning out of control (in banking as well as in the Gulf and elsewhere where governments ”protect” their citizens by turning community resources into a government commons, are growing and cannot be ignored.

One must ask – does it make any difference, either to the broader statist environment that we find ourselves, or to the behavior of BP, that BP is a corporation that is granted unlimited life and whose shareholders are excluded from any personal liability for corporate acts? I think that it undeniably matters, and quite deeply.

Just as libertarian and other commentators have suggested that we need to insist that firms that engage in the banking business be partnerships with unlimited liability in order to control the moral hazard engendered by the current system, so too should libertarians insist on restoring personal responsibility and ending both corporate limited liability and the government management of commons. If we do so, we will certainly see much greater efforts by those who own and/or manage business enterprises to control risks and behave responsibly – which will take pressure off of spiralling calls for corrupt and inept governments to “do something!”

For a preceding post, I put together an index to my posts to date, and  thought it might be useful to bump it up to a more neasily accessible stand-alone post.

In case anyone has missed it, I’ve done quite a bit of posting on the BP problem, in a manner intended to be fruitful (and not simply a noodge). Here are my posts, in chronological order:

Risk-shifting, BP and those nasty enviros (a response to Lew Rockwell)

Poor statists! If we close our eyes tightly enough, we can see clearly that Corporations are innocent VICTIMS, of governments that foist on them meaningless grants like limited liability & IP, and of malevolent, grasping citizens

Sheldon Richman doesn’t feel sorry for BP, either

Corporations uber Alles: Conveniently inconsistent on “abstractions” like “the environment”, Austrians overlook their preference for “corporations” over individuals,& their lack of interest in problem-solving

Persons-R-Us? Here’s someone’s interesting thought experiment: “What If BP Were A Human Being?”

Does it make any sense to treat corporations as “persons”, given the differences in incentives structures?

As BP’s oil spills into one of those inconvenient “ecosystems”, now even Reason TV rants about “dying oceans”

Time-out for some light humor on BP’s “ecosystem”: The BP Oil Spill Re-Enacted By Cats in 1 Minute!

Who’s at the short end of the stick when Government “Play[s] Fast and Loose with Civilization” in the Gulf of Mexico?

Ed Dolan on Other People’s Money: Government, Oil Spills, Financial Crises & Limited Liability

Scott Sumner misses government role in “sh*t happens”; epitomizes discussions of BP/offshore oil development

Kevin Carson says, “In a Truly Free Market, BP Would Be Toast”

More useful discussion by Carson, both on BP’s fate in a free market, and on the inept, feckless and captured regulatory state

Matt Yglesias, like many Austrians, misses the role of government in “Agency Problems and Corporate Misconduct”

A BP Reader: statist corporations, “the environment” and the Tragedy of the Government-Owned/-Managed Commons

Sheldon Richman joins Gene Callahan in naively arguing that, IF man’s activities are responsible for climate change, we need not government but simply louder and more obnoxious enviros

As Callahan and Richman laud consumer/moral pressure on polluters, others tell us a BP boycott is stupid

Rand Paul: a caricature of libertarian views on energy

BP: Unless we are to get lost in legal fictions, like Harry Shearer we must look beyond the shareholder curtain

Such a big crisis, yet so few words? Scratching my head over sporadic, thin drive-by postings at LvMI on our growing BP/Gulf disaster

Oil-Serfs-R-Us or the Tragedy of the Government-Owned Commons: the puny Lousianna “Shrimp King” humbled by BP & the Feds

“Economic insight and analysis”? Statist voicepiece WSJ headlines Broken Window Fallacy nonsense: Oil Spill May End Up Lifting GDP Slightly!

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

On ocean drilling, it’s time for Ron Bailey, oil flack (and other libertarians), to meet Ron Bailey, “tragedy of the commons” guru and to stand up for the Oil Serfs

The Eve of Destruction: Excellent post on how Government and statist corporations like BP are stifling community responses to the unfolding Gulf disaster

Disturbing news/views on the manageability of the BP gusher

Yes, another BP post!

The Guardian ran a story last weeks that illustrated some of the human costs of BP’s oil debacle. Lew Rockwell and Stephan Kinsella insist  that the legal fiction known as “BP” is the largest “victim”, but I find their moral clarity rather obtuse, if not perverted.

As men live and work in communities and make their livelihoods in coordinated activities, I’m not sure I agree with Stephan Kinsella’s insistence (in responding to my arguments that state-grants of limited liability to shareholders are unjustifiable and have significant pernicious consequences) that our focus in measuring responsibility must always be on individuals; I do, however, agree that such an examination may be quite helpful – even as I note how Lew, Stephan and others ignore their own prescription when rushing to defend massive, faceless organizations like “BP”, or when fulminating about evil, man-hating  (and corporate-funded) “enviro-fascists”.

With that in mind, I ran across the following article in The Guardian last week that presents human face of what “BP” (and its dirty partnership with the federal and state governments who have deprived users of natural resources of any rights to control such resources) has wrought in the Gulf (my emphasis):

BP oil spill ruined my life, says Louisiana shrimp king; Dean Blanchard’s firm used to account for 11% of the US shrimp supply. Now, he is reduced to supplying fuel and water to BP clean-up crews

(Susan Goldenberg, June 11)

Of all the folks in Louisiana spoiling for a fight with Tony Hayward, none perhaps brings more gusto to the challenge than Dean Blanchard, the local shrimp king.

The outer walls of the trailer office of his seafood empire are plastered with homemade signs reading “BP=Bayou Polluter” and “President Obama: BP took my business and my money.”

The frontroom is painted shrimp pink, and Blanchard is working himself up imagining what he would like to do to the BP chief executive if he ever got the chance: fist fight, public wrestling match, jail time?

“He took away everything I love most in the world. I am going to hunt that son of a bitch down like a ‘coon,” he said. “He wants his life back after all he has done to us? The hell with him.”

Then he speculates about peeing in the Queen’s water fountain. “What do you think would happen to me? I’d go to jail for that, and it would be relatively minor environmental damage.”

He may not immediately look the part in his faded shorts and blue vest and the jumble of buildings around the docks, but in the shrimp world, Blanchard is Hayward.

BP ranks in the top three oil companies; Blanchard says his are the third biggest shrimp docks in the world, with some 6,000 fishermen bringing him their catch. His company accounts for about 11% of the US shrimp supply.

In the pre-spill era, that would have put Hayward and Blanchard on near equal footing, he reckons. Oil and shrimp were the two poles of existence in this part of Louisiana. Offshore rigs and refinery tanks are as ubiquitous as fishing trawlers.

Blanchard had a foot in both worlds. One grandfather got rich on shrimp, establishing the business he now operates near BP’s local command centre. The other grandfather got rich from oil.

Now, with the gusher on the ocean floor and fishing banned in much of the Gulf, there is just oil clean-up. At the Sand Dollar marina, redeployed fishermen and shrimpers, hauling containment boom through the water instead of nets, share space with the coastguard and national guard.

The money is only a fraction of what it would be for a successful shrimp season and 2010 was shaping up to be a banner year.

“Every 10 years, when you get a cold winter, you get a really good shrimp crop,” Blanchard said. “We were licking our chops.”

On a good run, a big shrimp boat could earn $1m (£686,000) a day. The going rate for fishing for oil is $3,000, less for smaller boats – not a lot once divided among captain and crew. Several of the men say they have yet to be paid.

Blanchard says his losses are on a far grander scale. “I’ve lost $15m worth of sales in the last 50 days. That would have been $1m in my pocket,” he said.

A few of the big freezer boats are still going out, but Blanchard says he is reduced to selling BP fuel and water for its contract clean-up crews, and renting out dock space. By his terms, it’s a pittance and he has no idea when he will get back to work.

“What I make off of BP I could make in eight hours,” he said.

He is equally scathing of BP’s oil clean-up strategy. “I could take two 32oz Big Gulp cups from the 7-Eleven and do more than what they are doing,” he said.

Blanchard is far from the only angry man in town. The mayor, David Camardelle, was in Washington this week to testify before Congress. He nearly broke down. “The shrimp died. It’s a ghost town. The boom doesn’t work,” he said.

Around the corner from his operations, a family has erected 101 simple white crosses memorialising what has been lost to the spill.

There is sea food industry, with crosses for tuna, shrimp and oyster catches, but also “beach sunrises”, “seafood gumbo”, “redfish rodeo”, “family time”, “porch sitting” and “dog on beach”.

And for all his bluster, Blanchard is overwhelmed by the loss.

“I think I did everything right, and here this idiot came and didn’t know how to run his business and put me out of my business. People used to respect me in this town. Now I wake up in the morning and I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve yet to run across an LvMI post at all sympathetic to people to like Dean Blanchard, much less one in which a poster bothered to put a thinking cap on to make any useful suggestions, such as an insistence on rolling out “catch rights” for fishermen, and rights to veto or monitor petroleum exploration and development.

I note that I have already posted extensively on oceans/fisheries management; for interested readers here are links to some of those posts:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=ocean

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=fisheries

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=whale

More later.

Yes, another BP post!

It’s a bit puzzling – and disturbing – that, in the midst of an ongoing and epochal pollution event, LvMI authors seem to have so little to say about BP, the federal or state governments that have arrogated to themselves the rights to own and manage shared marine resources, the local communities who can see their ways of life being destroyed but lack any right to respond, the heavy-handed BP/Fed-run cleanup, media black-out and community lock-out, the trashing of a very important commons, or the ongoing stream of misunderstanding and mis analysis by politicians, pundits and the public.

Here’s not simply a golden opportunity, but a NEED to discuss, on the basis of Austrian and libertarian principles how things SHOULD work and COULD be improved, but no.

Instead of any sharing of insights or calls for ideas, we are treated to:

• a reflexive sympathy for “BP” and enviro-bashing from LvMI founder Lew Rockwell;
• an observation from Jeffrey Tucker on how a drilling moratorium in the Arctic is “playing fast and loose with civilization”;
• a suggestion from Grayson Lilburne that a boycott of BP by angry consumers would be stupid; and
• now a thin post by LvMI President Douglas French that simply reports – without comment –  the news that BP has suspended its quarterly dividend and the speculation that BP may file for bankruptcy.

What’s going on? Has the cat of smug hatred for “enviros” and “commons” and a conservative love of corporations and the burgeoning corporations-government partnership pretty much got everyone’s tongue? Are the issues not important enough? Or do Austrian insights or concerns simply not extend to pollution or to fishermen, shrimpers or oystermen or – shudder – when nature-lovers butt heads with corporations and government?

Our little oil gusher is now two months, something on the order of an Exxon Valdez every few days, and ticking, “Relief wells” are two months away, and we have no assurance that they will work. May I recommend abit of action?

I left the following comment on Doug French’s post:

TokyoTom June 17, 2010 at 8:48 am

Oh, in case anyone has missed it, I’ve done quite a bit of posting on the BP problem, in a manner intended to be fruitful (and not simply a noodge). Here are my posts, in chronological order:

Risk-shifting, BP and those nasty enviros

Poor statists! If we close our eyes tightly enough, we can see clearly that Corporations are innocent VICTIMS, of governments that foist on them meaningless grants like limited liability & IP, and of malevolent, grasping citizens

Sheldon Richman doesn’t feel sorry for BP, either

Corporations uber Alles: Conveniently inconsistent on “abstractions” like “the environment”, Austrians overlook their preference for “corporations” over individuals,& their lack of interest in problem-solving

Persons-R-Us? Here’s someone’s interesting thought experiment: “What If BP Were A Human Being?”

Does it make any sense to treat corporations as “persons”, given the differences in incentives structures?

As BP’s oil spills into one of those inconvenient “ecosystems”, now even Reason TV rants about “dying oceans”

Time-out for some light humor on BP’s “ecosystem”: The BP Oil Spill Re-Enacted By Cats in 1 Minute!

Who’s at the short end of the stick when Government “Play[s] Fast and Loose with Civilization” in the Gulf of Mexico?

Ed Dolan on Other People’s Money: Government, Oil Spills, Financial Crises & Limited Liability

Scott Sumner misses government role in “sh*t happens”; epitomizes discussions of BP/offshore oil development

Kevin Carson says, “In a Truly Free Market, BP Would Be Toast”

More useful discussion by Carson, both on BP’s fate in a free market, and on the inept, feckless and captured regulatory state

Matt Yglesias, like many Austrians, misses the role of government in “Agency Problems and Corporate Misconduct”

A BP Reader: statist corporations, “the environment” and the Tragedy of the Government-Owned/-Managed Commons

Sheldon Richman joins Gene Callahan in naively arguing that, IF man’s activities are responsible for climate change, we need not government but simply louder and more obnoxious enviros

As Callahan and Richman laud consumer/moral pressure on polluters, others tell us a BP boycott is stupid

Rand Paul: a caricature of libertarian views on energy

BP: Unless we are to get lost in legal fictions, like Harry Shearer we must look beyond the shareholder curtain

I have already criticized Lew Rockwell’s May 5, 2010 piece, “Feel Sorry for BP?”; and commented on a response that I received from Stephan Kinsella; I’d like here to  focus on a curious inconsistency.

1. I note that Lew Rockwell asserted that: (emphasis added)

“The abstraction called the “ecosystem” — which never seems to include mankind or civilization — has done far less for us than the oil industry, and the factories, planes, trains, and automobiles it fuels.”

and

“the environmentalists went nuts yet again, using the occasion to flail a private corporation and wail about the plight of the “ecosystem,” which somehow managed to survive and thrive after the Exxon debacle.”

While I questioned whether Lew really intended to assert that resources like air, that we use freely from the atmosphere are “far less” important to us than the oil-derived energy we use and disagreed with his facts about the continuing effect s of the Exxon Valdez spill), I agreed with him that the “ecosystem” is an abstraction that may often be unhelpful (emphasis added):

Austrians understand that focussing on the “ecosystem” is often an unhelpful abstraction and distraction from the fact that there are competing and conflicting interests held by people in resources that are not effectively owned or managed. The Austrian focus is on how to enable those with conflicting desires to coordinate their planning …

This perspective was neatly summarized by Roy Cordato, who said (emphasis added)

“by placing environmental problems within the context of personal and interpersonal plan formulation, we discover that they are not about the environment per se but about the resolution of human conflict.”

“The “social cost” approach to environmental economics has led to the “dehumanization” of issues related to the environment [where] [p]ollution or “tragedy of the commons” problems are not problems because of the damage that some people may or may not be inflicting on others, but because they create what amounts to disembodied harms. A problem occurs because some goods are “overproduced” while other goods are “underproduced.” In its more extreme form this has led to a separation of the concepts of costs and harm from human beings completely, substituting notions such as “costs to the environment,” and damage to the ecosystem.”

“pollution problems …  create an interpersonal conflict over the use of means and therefore obstruct efficient plan formulation and execution. Pollution is therefore not about harming the environment but about human conflict over the use of physical resources.”

“Humans cannot harm the environment. Instead, they can change the environment in such a way that it harms others who might be planning to use it for conflicting purposes.”

Even while I agree with Cordato about he focus on plan formation, concepts such as “ecosystems” and the “environment” may still be useful, and are often simply short-hand for resources “in the commons”, that is, resources that people value but are either unowned, partially-owned, commonly-/community-owned or government-owned. Some readers may recall that Elinor Ostrom the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, is a political scientist in the Austrian tradition who has devoted her career to studying human management of common resources? Lew himself expressly recognized the usefulness of “environment” in this case:

in a world in which government owns vast swaths, and the oceans are considered the commons of everyone? It becomes extremely difficult to assess damages to the environment at all.

2. Despite Lew’s focus on the abstraction of the “ecosystem”, it was curious that Lew (a) asserted that “BP is by far the leading victim” (my emphasis)  and that “The incident is a tragedy for BP and all the subcontractors involved while (b) severely castigating what I referred to in my post as “those nasty enviros” and their nature-loving, misanthropic motives. Lew’s words:

torrents of environmental hysteria.

the environmentalists went nuts yet again

he environmentalists, with their fear mongering and hatred of modern life [are happy about the disaster]

The environmentalists are thrilled because they get yet another chance to wail and moan about the plight of their beloved marshes and other allegedly sensitive land

The main advantage to the environmentalists is their propaganda victory in having yet another chance to rail against the evils of oil producers and ocean drilling. If they have their way, oil prices would be double or triple, there would never be another refinery built, and all development of the oceans would stop in the name of “protecting” things that do human beings not one bit of good.

As a follow-up to Lew Rockwell‘s Feel Sorry for BP? and my two sets of comments on it (Risk-shifting, BP and those nasty enviros, and Poor statists! If we close our eyes tightly enough, we can see clearly that Corporations are innocent VICTIMS, of governments that foist on them meaningless grants like limited liability & IP, and of malevolent, grasping citizens), I note and highly recommend Sheldon Richman’s May 14 commentaｒｙ, “Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill; Which system failed”, at TheFreemanOnline.org.

Here a portion of Sheldon’s commentary (emphasis added):

Yet, the New York Times reported, “Despite … repeated promises to reform, BP continues to lag other oil companies when it comes to safety, according to federal officials and industry analysts.” The Times said BP chief executive Tony Hayward “conceded that the company had problems when he took over three years ago. But he said he had instituted broad changes to improve safety….”

Why did BP have problems? The Times goes on: “Some analysts say the safety problems indicate that BP has not yet reined in the culture of risk that prevailed under Mr. Hayward’s predecessor, John Browne…. Mr. Browne set aggressive profit goals, and BP managers drastically cut costs to meet their quarterly targets. After the 2005 explosion in Texas City [killing 15 workers], investigators found that routine maintenance that might have averted the accident had been delayed because of pressure to reduce expenses.”

What we seem to have is a company that, in pursuit of short-term profits, was less than meticulous about safety (other people and their property, that is) while it and its industry effectively vetoed government safeguards that might have prevented the explosion that killed 11 workers and caused the damaging spill.

Some will defend BP in the name of the “free market” or minimize the event, protesting that the Obama administration’s remedial measures will “undermine our capitalist system.” Meanwhile, the “progressive” statists will declare that once again the free market has failed. The respective bases will be rallied.

Corporatist System

But BP’s defenders and statist critics both have it wrong. This is not the story of a well-meaning or negligent firm operating in the free market. Negligent or not, BP is a player in a corporatist system that for generations has featured a close relationship between government and major business firms. (It wouldn’t have surprised Adam Smith.) Prominent companies have always been influential at all levels of government — and no industry more so than oil, which has long been a top concern of the national policy elite, most particularly the foreign-policy establishment. When state governments failed in the 1920s to put a lid on unruly competition and low prices, the oil companies turned to Franklin Roosevelt and the federal government, winning the cartelizing Petroleum Code, significant parts of which were revived after the National Recovery Administration was declared unconstitutional. In the 1950s, when cheap imports depressed prices, the national government imposed quotas on Middle Eastern oil. (In 1960 OPEC, a “cartel to confront a cartel,” was founded.) Republican or Democratic, energy policy is not made without oil industry input.

In this context there’s less to the contrast between government regulation and corporate self-regulation than meets the eye. Self-regulation in a corporate state does not constitute the free market. When companies are sheltered in any substantial way from the competitive market’s disciplinary forces, incentives turn perverse. Moreover, “state capitalism” and the corporate form (pdf) – with its agency problem – can produce the temptation to cut costs imprudently in order to make the next quarterly report look attractive to shareholders.

“Putting profits before people” is a feature of state, or crony, capitalism not the free market.

I accepted the invitation of an empty comment thread to post a few comments, which I copy below:

Comment by TokyoTom on 14 May 2010:

Sheldon, great post.

I also posted a few thoughts in response to Lew Rockwell’s sympathy for BP and in reply to a response by Stephan Kinsella:

Risk-shifting, BP and those nasty enviros – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/alFkim

Poor statists! If we close our eyes tightly enough, we can see clearly that Corporations are innocent VICTIMS, of governments that foist on them meaningless grants like limited liability & IP, and of malevolent, grasping citizens http://bit.ly/dc3RD9

I agree with what you wrote, but would note the following as well:

– government’s “ownership” of the seas & seabed leave a continuing tragedy of the commons in its wake, as resource users have no rights to manage, invest in sustainability, or exclude, sue or negotiate with other users whose interests or use conflicts. Thus, fishermen, shrimpers, oystermen and the like were not in a position to negotiate in advance with BP on precautions, and are poorly situated to seek damages.

– you touched on the ridiculous and counterproductive limitation of liability the the US government gifted to BP, but fail to directly note or criticize the much deeper and pervasive problems that stem from state governments’ grant of corporate status, particularly “limited liability”.

From limited liability and corporate status flow a steady transfer of risks from enterprises to the public as a whole: the corporate form enables the growth of large enterprises poorly managed by shareholders (who are dis-incentivized by “veil-piercing” judicial doctrines from trying to closely manage, and generally have little practical ability to oversee anyway), the growth of risk-taking by managers (who, like shareholders, can capture the upside of risky ventures but have little or no personal liability when injury is caused to innocent third parties), growing power and ability to influence judges, politicians and media – and so greatly eroding strict common-law protection of property rights from pollution, and resulting threats to health and safety that spur government action and thus the cycle of struggle for control over government, in which insiders always have the upper hand.

But beside these points, I note that simply explaining that what led to the spill and our general state of affairs was not “free market” capitalism isn’t particularly helpful in giving people direction on how to improve our situation.

Should we:

– insist on ending legislative grants of limited liability, both for ocean oil & gas drilling and for corporations generally? should we insist that drilling only be conducted by partnerships that have no limited liability (but can buy insurance)?

– are there tools of moral suasion that we ought to apply? should we be insisting on naming the names and demanding personal responsibility by managers involved?

Not merely your diagnosis, but your thoughts on practical courses of treatment would be helpful.

Comment by TokyoTom on 14 May 2010:

Sheldon, great post.

I also posted a few thoughts in response to Lew Rockwell’s sympathy for BP and in reply to a response by Stephan Kinsella:

Risk-shifting, BP and those nasty enviros – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/alFkim

Poor statists! If we close our eyes tightly enough, we can see clearly that Corporations are innocent VICTIMS, of governments that foist on them meaningless grants like limited liability & IP, and of malevolent, grasping citizens http://bit.ly/dc3RD9

I agree with what you wrote, but would note the following as well:

– government’s “ownership” of the seas & seabed leave a continuing tragedy of the commons in its wake, as resource users have no rights to manage, invest in sustainability, or exclude, sue or negotiate with other users whose interests or use conflicts. Thus, fishermen, shrimpers, oystermen and the like were not in a position to negotiate in advance with BP on precautions, and are poorly situated to seek damages.

– you touched on the ridiculous and counterproductive limitation of liability the the US government gifted to BP, but fail to directly note or criticize the much deeper and pervasive problems that stem from state governments’ grant of corporate status, particularly “limited liability”.

From limited liability and corporate status flow a steady transfer of risks from enterprises to the public as a whole: the corporate form enables the growth of large enterprises poorly managed by shareholders (who are dis-incentivized by “veil-piercing” judicial doctrines from trying to closely manage, and generally have little practical ability to oversee anyway), the growth of risk-taking by managers (who, like shareholders, can capture the upside of risky ventures but have little or no personal liability when injury is caused to innocent third parties), growing power and ability to influence judges, politicians and media – and so greatly eroding strict common-law protection of property rights from pollution, and resulting threats to health and safety that spur government action and thus the cycle of struggle for control over government, in which insiders always have the upper hand.

But beside these points, I note that simply explaining that what led to the spill and our general state of affairs was not “free market” capitalism isn’t particularly helpful in giving people direction on how to improve our situation.

Should we:

– insist on ending legislative grants of limited liability, both for ocean oil & gas drilling and for corporations generally? should we insist that drilling only be conducted by partnerships that have no limited liability (but can buy insurance)?

– are there tools of moral suasion that we ought to apply? should we be insisting on naming the names and demanding personal responsibility by managers involved?

Not merely your diagnosis, but your thoughts on practical courses of treatment would be helpful.

[This is a work in progress and largely taken from previous posts, but readers might find some value in it in the meanwhile.]

1. Heated but vacuous climate wars

On environmental issues in general and climate in particular, find me someone (like George Will) ranting about “Malthusians” or “environazis” or somesuch, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t understand – or refuses to acknowledge – the difference between:

(1) wealth-creating markets based on private property and/or voluntary interactions/contracts protected by law, and

(2) the tragedy of the commons situations that result when there are NO property rights (atmosphere, oceans), when the pressures of developed markets swamp indigenous hunter-gather community rules, in many cases where governments formally own and purport to manage “public” resources, and when governments absolve purportedly “private” actors from liability for harms to others (such as via grants of “limited liability“).

So what’s the deal? Here’s a perfect opportunity for skeptics to educate the supposedly market ignorant, but they refuse, preferring to focus instead on why concerned scientists must be wrong, how concerns by a broad swath of society about climate have become a matter of an irrational, deluded “religious” faith, or that those raising their concerns are “misanthropes” or worse.

Such pigheadedness is met by those on the left likewise see libertarians and small-government conservatives as deluded and/or deliberate pawns of evil Earth-destroying corporations.

Both sides, it seems, prefer to fight – and to see themselves as right and the “others” as evil – rather than to reason.

While we should not regret that we cannot really constrain human nature very well, at least libertarian and others who profess to love markets ought to be paying attention to the inadequate institutional framework that is not only poisoning the political atmosphere, but posing risks to important globally and regionally shared open-access commons like the atmosphere and oceans (which are probably are in much more immediate and grave threat than the climate). And they also ought to recognize that there are important economic interests that profit from the current flawed institutional framework and have quite deliberately encouraged the current culture war.

2. Why the reflexive libertarian disengagement?

I have on numerous occasions tried to point out, to posters on the Mises Blog who have addressed climate issues, the stunning unproductivity of the approach that they have taken — that of focussing on science and dismissing motivations and preferences, rather than exploring root causes and middle ground, and have continued to scratch my head at the obstinacy and apparent lack of vision.

The following seem to be the chief factors at work in the general libertarian resistance to any government action on climate change:

– Many libertarians, as CEI’s Chris Horner has stated,  see “global warming [as] the bottomless well of excuses for the relentless growth of Big Government.”  Even libertarians who agree that is AGW is a serious problem are worried, for good reason, that government approaches to climate change will be a train wreck – in other words, that the government “cure” will be worse than the problem.

– Libertarians have in general drifted quite far from environmentalists (though there remain many productive free-market environmentalists/conservationists). Even though libertarians and environmentalists still share a mistrust of big government, environmentalists, on the one hand, generally have come to believe that MORE government is the answer, despite all of the problems associated with the socialized ownership of resources and/or inefficient bureaucratic management (witness the crashing of many managed fisheries in the US), the manipulation of such management to benefit bureaucratic interests, special interests and insiders (wildfire fighting budgets, fossil fuel and hard rock mining, etc.) and the resultant and inescapable politicization of all disputes due to the absence of private markets. On the other hand, many libertarians  reflexively favor business over “concerned citizens”, while other libertarians see that government “solutions” themselves tend to snowball into costly problems that work in favor of big business and create pressures for more government intervention. Thus, libertarians often see environmentalists as simply another group fighting to expand government, and are hostile as a result.

– Libertarians are as subject to reflexive, partisan position-taking as any one else. Because they are reflexively opposed to government action, they find it easier to operate from a position of skepticism in trying to bat down AGW scientific and economic arguments (and to slam the motives of those arguing that AGW must be addressed by government) than to open-mindedly review the evidence or consider ways that libertarian aims can be advanced by using the pressure from “enviro” goals.

This reflexive hostility – at times quite startingly vehement – is a shame (but human), because it blunts the libertarian message in explaining what libertarians understand very well – that environmental problems arise when property rights over resources are not clearly defined or enforceable, and when governments (mis)manage resources, and that there are various private steps and changes in government policy that would undo the previous government actions that are at the root of environmentalists’ frustrations.The reflexive hostility is also a shame because it has the effect, in my mind rather clearly, of rendering libertarians largely blind to the ways that large energy, power and certain manufacturing corporations continue to benefit from (and invest heavily in maintaining) the existing regulatory structure, in ways that shift large costs and risks to unconsenting third parties.

– There are some libertarians and others who profess to love free markets at AEI, CEI, Cato, IER, Master Resource and similar institutions that are partly in pay of fossil fuel interests, and so find it in their personal interests to challenge both climate science and policy proposals that would impose costs on their funders.

I felt particularly struck by the commonness of a refrain we are hearing from various pundits who prefer to question the good will or sanity of environmentalists over the harder work of engaging in a good faith examination and discussion of the underlying institutional problem of ALL “environmental” disputes:  namely, a lack of property rights and/or a means to enforce them. 

3. The whys of climate concerns and calls for “clean” energy

I want to get started with a list of policy changes that I think libertarians can and should be championing in response to the climate policy proposals of others.

The incessant calls for – and criticism of – government climate change policies and government subsidies and mandates for “green/clean power” both ignore root causes and potential common ground.  As a result, both sides of the debate are largely talking past each other, one talking about why there is a pressing need for government policy to address climate change concerns, while the other is concerned chiefly about the likelihood of heavy-handed mis-regulation and wasted resources. This leaves the middle ground unexplored.

There are plenty of root causes for the calls for legislative and regulatory mandates in favor of climate policies and clean / green / renewable power, such as:

• concerns about apparent ongoing climate change, warnings by scientific bodies and apprehensions of increasing risk as China, India and other developing economies rapidly scale up their CO2, methane and other emissions,
• the political deals in favor of environmentally dirty coal and older power plants under the Clean Air Act,
• the enduring role of the federal and state governments in owning vast coal and oil & gas fields and relying on the royalties (which it does not share with citizens, but go into the General Pork Pool, with a relatively meager cut to states),
• the unwillingness of state courts, in the face of the political power of the energy and power industries, to protect persons and private property from pollution and environmental disruption created by federally-licensed energy development and power projects,
• the deep involvement of the government in developing, encouraging and regulating nuclear power, and
• the frustration of consumer demand for green energy, and the inefficient and inaccurate pricing and supply of electricity, resulting from the grant by states of public utility monopolies and the regulation of the pricing and investments by utilities, which greatly restricts the freedom of power markets, from the ability of consumers to choose their provider, to the freedom of utilities to determine what infrastructure to invest in, to even simple information as to the cost of power as it varies by time of day and season, and the amount of electricity that consumers use by time of day or appliance.

4. Is a small-government, libertarian climate/green agenda possible and desirable?

So what is a good libertarian to suggest? This seems rather straight-forward, once one doffs his partisan, do-battle-with-evil-green-fascist-commies armor and puts on his thinking cap.

From my earlier comment to Stephan Kinsella:

As Rob Bradley once reluctantly acknowledged to me, in the halcyon days before he banned me from the “free-market” Master Resource blog, “a free-market approach is not about “do nothing” but implementing a whole new energy approach to remove myriad regulation and subsidies that have built up over a century or more.” But unfortunately the wheels of this principled concern have never hit the ground at MR [my persistence in pointing this out it, and in questioning whether his blog was a front for fossil fuel interests, apparently earned me the boot].

As I have noted in a litany of posts at my blog, pro-freedom regulatory changes might include:

• accelerating cleaner power investments by eliminating corporate income taxes or allowing immediate depreciation of capital investment (which would make new investments more attractive),
• eliminating antitrust immunity for public utility monopolies to increase competition, allow consumer choice, peak pricing and “smart metering” that will rapidly push large potential efficiency gains (as identified by McKinsey),
• ending Clean Air Act handouts to the worst utilities (or otherwise unwinding burdensome regulations and moving to lighter and more common-law dependent approaches),
• ending energy subsidies generally (including federal liability caps for nuclear power and allowing states to license),
• speeding economic growth and adaptation in the poorer countries most threatened by climate change by rolling back domestic agricultural corporate welfare programs (ethanol and sugar), and
• if there is to be any type of carbon pricing at all, insisting that it is a per capita, fully-rebated carbon tax (puts the revenues in the hands of those with the best claim to it, eliminates regressive impact and price volatility, least new bureaucracy, most transparent, and least susceptible to pork).

Other policy changes could also be put on the table, such as:

• an insistence that government resource management be improved by requiring that half of all royalties from mineral and fossil fuel development be rebated to citizens (with a slice to the administering agency), and
  
• reducing understandable NIMBY problems by (i) encouraging project planners to proactively compensate persons in affected areas and (ii) reducing fears of corporate abuses, by providing that corporate executives have personal liability for environmental torts (in recognition of the fact that the profound risk-shifting that limited liability corporations are capable of that often elicits strong public opposition and fuels regulatory pressure).

5. Other libertarian discussants

A fair number of libertarian commenters on climate appear to accept mainstream sciences, though there remain natural policy disagreements. Ron Bailey, science correspondence at Reason and Jonathan Adler, a resources law prof at Case Western, Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem blog, and David Zetland, who blogs on water issues, come to mind.

I`m not the only one – other libertarian climate proposals are here:

• Jonathan Adler at Case Western (2000); he has other useful commentary here, here,
• Bruce Yandle, Professor Emeritus at Clemson University, Senior Fellow at PERC (the “free market” environmentalism think tank) and a respected thinker on common-law and free-market approaches to environmental problems, has in PERC’s Spring 2008 report specifically proposed a “A No-Regrets Carbon Reduction Policy“;
• Iain Murray of CEI; and
• Cato’s Jerry Taylor is a frequent commentator and Indur Goklany has advanced a specific climate change-targeted proposal.
•  AEI’s Steven Hayward and Ken Green together have provided a number of detailed analyses (though with a distinct tendency to go lightly on fossil fuels).

Several libertarians recently urged constructive libertarian approaches to climate change:

• Edwin Dolan, in his Fall 2006 Cato Journal essay, “Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Position“, analyzes relevant Lockean considerations and cautions that market liberals appear to be hamstringing their own analytic strengths by falling into a reflexive and conservative mind-frames that benefit established economic interests.
• Sheldon Richman of the Foundation for Economic Education also recommends Dolan’s essay and calls for less wishful thinking and greater engagement by libertarians in his piece The Goal Is Freedom: Global Warming and the Layman (December 8, 2006; The Freeman):
• Gene Callahan makes a similar warning in his essay “How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming“, in the October 2007 issue of The Freeman.
• Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine, “Congratulations to Al Gore; But be wary of the man’s proposed solutions for global warming“,  October 12, 2007.
• One self-described libertarian group in California has specifically proposed carbon taxes, though their “Pay Your Air Share” proposal appears to be little-discussed.
• Dan C. Shahar, in his recent paper, “Justice and Climate Change: Toward a Libertarian Analysis” (The Independent Review, Fall 2009), notes that (i) libertarian arguments to the effect that, even if man contributes to climate change, mankind should just roll with the punches and adapt, presuppose that man-made climate change would not represent an injustice, and (ii) if climate change IS an injustice, libertarians should eagerly offer ideas about how best to protect the victims’ rights.

There have been several open disputes, which indicate a shift from dismissal of science to a discussion of policy; the below exchanges of view are worthy of note:

• The Cato Institute dedicated its entire August 2008 monthly issue of Cato Unbound, its online forum, to discussing policy responses to ongoing climate change.  The issue, entitled “Keeping Our Cool: What to Do about Global Warming“, contains essays from and several rounds of discussion between Jim Manzi, statistician and CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies, Cato Institute author Indur Goklany; climate scientist Joseph J. Romm, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the co-founders of The Breakthrough Institute.  My extended comments are here.

• Reason Foundation, posted an exchange on Climate Change and Property Rights June 12th, 2008 (involving Reason’s Shikha Dalmia, Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan H. Adler, and author Indur Goklany); discussed by Ron Bailey of ReasonOnline here; here`s my take.

• Debate at Reason, October 2007, Ron Bailey, Science Correspondent at Reason, Fred L. Smith, Jr., President and Founder of CEI, and Lynne Kiesling, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Northwestern University, and former director of economic policy at the Reason Foundation.

• Reason Foundation, Global Warming and Potential Policy Solutions September 7th, 2006 (Reason’s Shikha Dalmia, George Mason University Department of Economics Chair Don Boudreaux, and the International Policy Network’s Julian Morris).

• Readers might also find this upbraiding of Penn & Teller at a gathering of skeptics in 2008 to be interesting.

Finally, I have collected here some Austrian-based papers on environmental issues that are worthy of note:

Environmental Markets?  Links to Austrians

Ones such paper is the following: Terry L. Anderson and J. Bishop Grewell, Property Rights Solutions for the Global Commons: Bottom-Up or Top-Down?

[Update: My follow-up post outlines the WSJ`s report and chief recommendations.]

I thought I’d elevate what was a side and closing comment on Stephan Kinsella’s Avatar thread, about an appalling group of articles at the Wall Street Journal, which seems to have absolutely no clue about how the financial crisis stems from a chain of   government interventions, was fuelled by a government-inflated bubble and was “intermediated” by a financial industry rife with moral hazard.

The WSJ is great at drumming up fears about a world-wide climate change cabal, consisting of everyone one who showed up at Copenhagen, blogged about it or thought about it (fears of regulatory over-reach are perfectly understandable, but nary a cui bono question about the “skeptics” industry), but just what in the heck are they trying to pull here – help to CREATE world government, directed by the same firms and regulators who brought us market opacity, arbitraged investment and capital requirements intended to backstop deposit insurance, rampant profit-taking, financial meltdown and tremendous risk-shifting (to shareholders & taxpayers)? Is the WSJ really so naive about rent-seeking, moral hazard and mission creep?

I urge everyone to take a very close look at the WSJ’s “Future of Finance Initiative” and their recent “Fixing Global Finance” report.

Here’s a copy of my comment, as noted in my prior blog post (with some bracketed additions and changes to order):

What happens abroad at the “Avatar” is pretty basic, but the same
nonsense, with taxpayers, investors and consumers playing the role of
victim, can be seen at home. Has anybody seen the jaw-droppingly
appalling report that the WSJ has run on “Fixing Global Finance”, based
on their “Future of Finance Initiative”, in which they cheerlead a
bunch of financial firms in their efforts to abandon free markets and
to structure global regulation and regulators, to be staffed by a
revolving door of themselves?

[I think I’m being fair to see this as posing a threat to markets and
freedom at least as great as what others see in the more multi-faceted
climate change muddle.]

Even Paul Volker was appalled, not at
their willingness to create more regulation, but at their unwillingness
to confront the moral hazard problems (tied to regulation of public
corporations and the financial sector) that lie at the core of the
financial meltdown. [Volker seems to overlooked the crucial role of
government in driving and feeding the moral hazard problems.] Here’s the link, for those of you who missed it:
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/future-of-finance-121409.html Property rights, corporations and government-complicit theft? Hmm.

[Sounds familiar. Maybe some of those who want to battle corporate
excesses might not be so crazy after all, even if they neglect to
understand the risks of negative consequences of seeking help from
government. And maybe someday libertarians will get a little more
serious about addressing the festering
concatenation of corporate-linked problems that are generating so much
rot at the core of our government and public company/financial company
sector.]

Corporations have very unfortunately been inescapably tainted
with statism from the get-go, in ways that play out negatively both
abroad and at home. I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to examining the
entanglement of corporations and government: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=limited

Our state governments were wrong to get into competition with each
other to grant corporate status to investor-owned enterprises, in
exchange for fees and later taxes. Corporate status freed investors
from down-side risk, by limiting liability to the amount of capital
contributed. This incentivized investors to encourage corporations to
embark on risky activities that shifted costs to innocent third
parties; the concentration of wealth in corporations (that now have
unlimited lives and purposes, subject to survival in the market); the
corruption of the court system that once protected third parties from
damages caused by others (by replacing strict liability with balancing
tests); and the ensuing battle over legislatures and courts to check
corporate abuses.

I will try to come back later and provide more details of the WSJ initiative/report, but for now let me note that I have relevant discussion at some of my posts on limited liability (see link above) and on “Rot at the Core“.