So, Walter, can you first just give us a little background on how BP and other oil companies
go about drilling in the ocean?
Do they actually own their own land?
I'm sorry, I didn't hear your full question, it's sort of buzzed out halfway through.
Could you repeat that, please?
Oh, of course.
I wanted to know, can you give us just a little background on how BP and other oil companies
go about drilling?
Do they actually own the land that they drill?
Well, in some cases, they own the land that they drill on.
We're now talking about land. In some cases, they lease it from other private people. In some cases, they lease it from the government.
In the case of BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, they got permission from the U.S. government's minerals management service.
And that's how they were licensed to drill at the place that they drilled at.
How long have we had federal land in the outer continental shelf?
It's been a good number of years. I don't know the exact amount, but this is not a new departure.
In Austrian economics, or as Michael McKay likes to say, reality economics, we believe in totally private land, even private oceans.
Oceans. How does this even work in the ocean? How do you divide up the land?
Well, you know, it's interesting. The oceans comprise what? Seventy-five percent of the
earth's surface, and the land comprises twenty-five percent of the earth's surface. And the oceans
are unruly, and they contribute to world GDP. I don't know what, half a percent, a percent?
Where as the 25% of the Earth's surface that is owned by people, not all of it, governments
hog up some of it, it creates 98% of the GDP and the reason for this is the tragedy of
the commons.
What the tragedy of the commons is, is that if something is owned in common, people tend
not to take as good care of it as they otherwise would and if they own it privately, they take
very good care of it.
One of the examples I used to illustrate the tragedy of the commons is the cow and the
buffalo, which are very, very similar animals.
The cow has always been owned privately.
The buffalo was unowned, similar to the tragedy of the commons of the ocean, and almost went
extinct.
The reason for that is that if you own a cow and you shoot it, the cost to you of shooting
that cow is one cow tomorrow that you don't have.
For more information, visit www.fema.gov.
Private Property, I want to get the most value out of it.
Is that what homesteading means?
Well, homesteading is a little different.
Actually, let me cut you off here.
We're about to go out to our first break.
Sure.
So, when we come back, we'll talk about why it's such an important function in private
property.
So, we're with Dr. Walter Block and I'm guest host, Zoe Russell.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to Radio Free Market.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Russell, taken over the reins from Michael McKay for today.
This is a live show, so give us a call at 1-800-313-9443 if you want to call in and
ask Dr. Walter Block any question you may have.
We were just talking about homesteading and what homesteading means and why it's such
an important function in private property.
Yes, homesteading is the traditional way in which you get to own land, this virgin territory.
You go out there and you clear the tree stumps and you put in some corn and you then own
those hundred acres or whatever it is that you cleared and you now have homesteaded that
land.
The challenge is how do you homestead or how do you put into private hands rivers, lakes,
oceans, things like that because what I try to establish in the last segment is that if
If you don't, you have the tragedy of the commons where people tend to misuse and overuse
the resource.
Well, there are various ways that you could privatize.
Remember, I'm in New Orleans and we'll never forget Katrina and the overflow of the Mississippi
River that landed in our basements and our first floors.
Well, if there was a Mississippi River corporation that owned it and was responsible for it,
Presumably they do a better job than the Army Corps of Engineers who don't lose money when
something bad like this happens.
But how do you get the Mississippi River Corporation to go in the first place?
Well, one way is whoever homesteaded the Mississippi River.
It's a little difficult.
This late in the day, I mean if this had been done in, I don't know, 1750, we might have
had a clearer shot.
How could we do it now?
It's a little bit like unscrambling the egg, but the way I would say is take every city
or every person that lives within five miles of the Mississippi River or ten miles, and
every person who has been on that river other than just once or twice as a rider in a cruise
ship, and let's say there are 15 million such people that live there or work on the river
regularly.
Well, now what you do is you create this new thing called Mississippi River Corporation
and you have 15 million shares and you give one share to everybody and now that company
is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and you can buy more shares, you can sell your
own share and now you have a viable company that is responsible and similarly for the
Gulf of Mexico.
You take New Orleans, you take a few cities in Florida, Western Florida, you take a few
to Drill for Oil, it's going to be a lot more careful than the Minerals Management Service
who were accused of watching pornography when they should have been on the job.
In any case, the MNS doesn't lose money when you have the spill, nor does Obama, whereas
this company would lose a lot of money so it would have a much greater incentive to
make sure that accidents like this didn't happen in the first place.
Will this be perfect?
No. Look, Bill Gates makes mistakes. Ford and Chrysler, private companies, make mistakes.
It's just that in the private sector, when you make a mistake, you lose money and this
tends to stop you from making too many more mistakes because if you do, you go bankrupt
and you're taken over by more efficient people. So, to get back to your question of homesteading,
that this ideally would be that you mix your labor with the land or the water and you get
to Own It, and the key is to get things in the private hands, that's something that
the Soviets learned in 1991 when their economy went kablooey and now they're doing a lot
better.
The way they privatized it was a little problematic but at least it's in quasi-private hands which
is better than the Soviet system of central planning.
We can cover some of the issues that come up when the government is the property owner.
But first, I want to know, is that the correct term?
The government is the property owner of the Gulf of Mexico.
You don't have the same ... Sorry, go ahead.
That's one way of putting it.
In effect, the government is the property owner.
Another way of putting it is that there's really no owner.
It's an unowned resource.
But either way, it's economic illiteracy, it's economic debacle when the government owns something
And private owners have a certain value that they've determined for their plot of land.
This is what they can get out of their plot of land.
So does the government even try and find a value for public land?
How do they go about doing that?
In a case where they've got this $20 billion escrow fund that BP has put up, how did they
Certainly, with all this public land, who can even claim a loss on their land that they
don't own, like a fisherman or a chef whose business has lost money due to a decline in
seafood?
Can they sue BP?
Yeah, well, this is for the courts to decide, or for Obama to decide, I guess, and I don't
know how the courts will determine these sorts of things, but you know, no matter how they
How do they decide? There is some sort of problem, at least for the libertarian. Look,
suppose you own a restaurant and I decide not to patronize you even though I've been
a regular customer of yours for years. You can't sue me because we have an arm's length
arrangement. You know, I come at will to your restaurant. Well, you know, if I decide not
to come to your restaurant because I want to go on a diet, you know, you can't sue the
I think that the only people that should be able to sue BT are people whose land gets
oil on it or fishermen maybe because in effect you've gotten oil on their land which is the
ocean.
It's interesting that the way these people are going is just nothing short of horrible.
If you wanted to get a list of what not to do with the oil spill, you should consult
what Obama is doing.
For example, first, he's not allowing poor Bobby Jindal, our governor, to put berms that
as big sand banks to protect the Louisiana coast.
I don't understand that.
Surely there are some sort of state's rights where Bobby Jindal, if he wants, can put in
sand protection for the environment.
Another one is this thing called the Jones Act.
What's the Jones Act?
The Jones Act is this piece of labor legislation which says that the only boats that can apply
the waters of the Gulf of Mexico or indeed our coasts in general are boats that are owned
and operated by Americans.
Well, you know, America is not the world's leading expert in everything and when it comes
to clearing up oil, there are other countries such as the Dutch who are very used to dealing
with the oil storage because of their dikes and those guys have gotten much better technology,
techniques, much better trained people on their boats and they've offered to come in
and Health for Free, but the Jones Act says they can't and Obama is beholden to the unions
and he's not allowing them to come.
It's very similar to what happened in Katrina when FEMA wouldn't allow people to come in
from Ohio or Texas or wherever they wanted to come and help us and there were all sorts
of boats with hotel accommodation on their boats and FEMA turned them away, FEMA turned
People with tractor trailers full of ice or water or orange juice.
Very similar situation to what Obama is doing.
It's almost like he wants to make the BP disaster even worse.
Right.
But at the same time, they'll blame it on BP.
I have a quote from Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
He says, I don't want to dwell on coulda, shoulda, woulda.
There's nothing I can really point to that we shouldn't have done based on what we knew
at the time.
So, you bring in these regulatory agencies that aren't experts in the field and let
them guess at it with a very high learning curve.
Yes, well, you know, people are now blaming private enterprises.
You see, BP, British Petroleum, they're a private company.
Look what they did.
We need more government.
But this is nonsense.
This is nonsense on stilts.
The Minerals Management Service required of BP that they file a plan with them in terms
of what will happen.
Well, BP did what the MMS said.
It's the MMS's fault for not better regulating.
It's that old refrain, first the market is there and the market is not perfect so there's
a little problem and they're starting with regulation, they have regulation A. Well,
And A causes problems, instead of going back to the free market system, which is not perfect,
but a lot better than government, they go to regulation B, which screws things up even
more and they say, well, see, the market is failing, we need regulation C and D.
Right.
And I think we're up to X now or Y or Z.
Right.
Well, it's a similar thing with the Minerals Management Service, they've been regulating
BP up front, sideways, backwards, east, west, north and south, and now they're blaming BP?
Yeah.
Do you see that, I mean I think that public property or private property rather is just
a tenet of Austrian economics and I see when they break that it's just a self-reinforcing
cycle, larger and larger government growth stems out of the first mistake of just veering
away from private property in the first place.
I think you said it very well.
Okay, well I guess we'll head out to another break here, we'll be right back to Radio Free
in Market. We were just covering regulation of public property by the government and coming
up we'll talk about it a little bit more and some of the problems that come about.
Welcome back to Radio Free Market. Again, this is a live show so you're welcome to call
in to 1-800-313-9443. I'm Zoe Russell, the guest host today and my guest is Dr. Walter
and the regulation that private property provides instead of having all this mess with public
property.
So let's just go into regulation a little bit.
I'm going to read you a quote, a comment that I found online and I just thought it wrapped
up perfectly what people always tell me about industry.
It's pretty clear that self-regulation never works because industry has always had to keep
of Increasing Profits and Cutting Corners is an easy way to increase profits, even though
it can have massive negative effects for the rest of society.
We need the government to be the cop who forces industry not to arm the rest of us.
In terms of industry in a private ocean, would you still have regulations on business?
Well, you know, in a sense, I don't fully disagree with it, although I certainly disagree
with the tenor of that quote.
Certainly you need cops. Not just for industry, but for anybody. Look, you know, A is a big
fat bully and B is a 90-pound weakling and if A hits B, you know, somebody's got to tell
A to cut it out. And there's fraud. People do steal from each other and businesses are
not immune to that. So the cop has to be a referee. The cop has to make sure that people
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit
Fortunately, the bad kind of regulation, economic regulation, which is not limited to stopping
people, as in the quote, from cutting corners, yes, you cut corners and you sell a pound
worth of fish and it's only got 15 ounces, you go to jail.
But who's the best guarantor of that?
Is it the government or is it private enterprise?
And a case can be made that even for that sort of a thing, you're much better off with
The private certification agencies, for example, Posture Foods, is Posture Foods a governmental
thing?
No, but they certify the quality of certain foods and there are private agencies that
certify that the scales in the butcher shop or in the bakery are going well.
Okay, if you're having a limited government, the government should be limited to that sort
of a thing.
But the government is doing way more than that.
They're not just blowing a whistle against a foul in hockey.
They're, as I said before, they're actually picking up the stick and shooting the puck
into one of the nets and then the game is ruined, if I can make that analogy.
For example, getting back to the BP case, there is an environmental rule that it is
illegal to dump water into the Gulf of Mexico that has more than 15 parts per million of
impurities.
Okay, maybe this is a reasonable rule, I won't get into that, but right now what you have
is with this massive oil spill, you've got 10,000 or 100,000 per million of impurities
and you have these Dutch ships that can scoop up acre feet of water, gigantic amounts of
water, scoop it up where it's got 100,000 say impurities per million and put it back
where it only has say 25 parts impurities per million and they won't let them do it
Because the crazy environmental law says that you have to have no more than fifteen parts per million.
You'd think that if Obama had any horse sense or common sense or whatever,
you'd say, okay, look, this is a not unreasonable rule during ordinary times, but this is not ordinary times.
Let's let those Dutch ships come in and scoop up all the crappy water and dump a little crap back into it.
Well, we have a caller on the line, so I'm going to let Patrick from Pennsylvania ask
his question of Dr. Block.
Patrick, are you there?
Yes, I'm here Zoe.
Thanks for taking my call and I want to say I think you're doing a great job in Michael's
absence and hello, Walter, I hope you're doing well.
I teach a class at the University of Iowa in the spring in Austrian Economics and I
just wondered if you could give me your take on this to make sure that I'm actually sort
of presenting this properly.
How would you respond to someone who says, well, home schooling is fine but we can't
let those...
I'm going to have to cut you off and then we'll get right back to your question at the start of the next section, which is our long section.
So everybody just stick around through the commercials and come back to Radio Free Market.
Hello, everyone. We're back. Radio Free Market and myself, Zoe Russell, are here with Dr. Walter Block.
And I believe Patrick from Pennsylvania is still on the line. Patrick, can you go ahead with your question?
Dr. Block, I wondered if you could respond to a common concern that people have about
homesteading.
They say, well, that might have been fine for the wild west in America, but we certainly
cannot allow the Russians or the Chinese to come into the Arctic Ocean and grab up all
that oil and just say that they own it because they take it.
What do you have to say to that?
You know, Canada is really rabid about the Arctic, that they sort of own it, but if they
don't do anything to it, and someone else does, I don't see why the first-come, first-served
rules shouldn't apply to take the Antarctic, the southern Arctic.
Let's say I go down there and I homestead 10 square miles of it by putting in a couple
The Theory of Money and Credit
By there, you should get it. Now, if Canada was there first and they've used this stuff,
which I very much doubt because there's a vast amount of the Northern Canada, I don't
see what the U.S. has got to do. This is more a Canadian sort of thing, but if they're not
using it, I'm with the philosophy, use it or lose it. By the way, this really isn't an
Austrian question, it's more of a libertarian question, but that's a minor point. How does
Why does this idea grab you that the first person who homesteads the land, if it's virgin
land and no one else has touched it, should get to own it, even if he has yellow skin
as in Chinese or whatever skin color the Russians have, just the same as us?
Why shouldn't they get to be the owner of it?
And also similarly, if there are parts of the Soviet, what do you call it, arctic that
they've never used, why shouldn't someone from Africa be the first to use that and get
Well, I agree with you, Dr. Block. In fact, that's what, of course, I thank you for validating
what my answer has been to that. And it does seem to me preposterous that any nation can
just lay claim through fiat by just saying, well, we just own the Arctic. I said it's
very much like the ridiculous claims of the Spanish conquistadors who came to the eastern
Show of North America and claimed all of the continent for the king of Spain.
That's just ridiculous.
Look, even within the continental U.S., I flew over, what was it, Colorado, Wyoming, the Rocky Mountains.
I tell you, the Rocky Mountains are empty.
Empty.
Well, you know, suppose some Chinese guy or some Martian landed in the middle of, I don't know,
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, one of those places where the Rockies are.
My geography isn't my strong suit.
Why couldn't a motion, a nice peaceful motion, or Chinese or African or I don't know, whatever,
just say, okay, look, I now have homesteaded this land, I've fixed it up, I've got a corn crop or whatever it is I've done.
I don't see the justice of claiming that I own stuff that I never touched.
Yes, and especially when we're talking about the most politicized commodity on the earth right now, which is oil,
If the Russians, for example, spend what would have to be billions of dollars to drill in
the hostile environment of the Arctic, they pull out oil.
That's oil that goes on to the market that increases the supply of oil in the world,
lowers the price of oil.
We all benefit from that, and the Russians have spent their money to get it.
Why would, just from an ethical standpoint, would they not be entitled to reap the rewards
for bringing us a product that we all want?
Precisely.
Also, it would be nice if the Russians were logically consistent.
What's the northern area of Russia?
Siberia, I suppose.
Siberia, that's it.
Suppose somebody from Africa or Siberia or Mars, Venus, whatever, goes to those areas
The Russian should be willing to allow that. In other words, if we allow them to come to our so-called territory, they should reciprocate.
Whether or not they do, I fully agree with you.
Ethics requires that the first homesteader has the best claim on it.
Much better claim than someone who just said, well, I claim the sun, the moon and the stars. That's just crazy.
Very good. Thank you, Dr. Locke.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Patrick.
Thanks for contributing.
Alright, so I guess we'll get back to regulation. I have a quote from Barack Obama and he said,
President Obama, and he said in his address to the nation that oil companies showered regulators
with gifts and favors and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections
and write their own regulations. So does this oversight, does this behavior surprise you
from a regulatory agency?
Oh no, this doesn't surprise me one bit. You know, let me get into the theory of regulation
just a little bit. The first theory of regulation is that the free marketplace, free enterprise
is no good, they're a bunch of bums, they're cutting corners, and what we need is government
to regulate them. Well, this is nonsense because we can trust the cleanliness of the bathrooms
in McDonald's much better than we can trust the cleanliness of the bathrooms in the post
If the post office bathrooms are dirty, or the service is bad, they don't lose money.
Whereas if you go to McDonald's and you don't get the service you want, you go to Burger
King and Wendy's or whatever, so competition brings about a better product.
But the second one is this thing that Obama is talking about called Capture Theory.
Here the idea is that at one time the market was bad, the capitalists were exploiting the
customers, which is ridiculous, but that's the theory.
And then we had regulations and the regulators were regulating the business in favor of the
consumer.
Right.
Then what happened is you had capture, namely the regulator, the business would start showering
them with gifts or to put it in a labor economics point of view, the way to really get a promotion
in the private sector is to go become a regulator and then go back to the private sector in
in the Higher Capacity and then go back to the regulator, so you sort of have this back
and forth.
A revolving door.
I couldn't have said it better.
I was looking for that word between the regulator and the regulator and the gifts go back and
forth and this is called capture theory.
But the third and even more sophisticated level of regulation is what happened with
the Food and Drug Administration when that first came in and there's this guy, Gabriel
Hacking Inspection and the Railroad Regulation, which sets out regulations which are easier
for big companies like us to satisfy vis-a-vis commons of scale, and also we're going to
put our people in these regulatory bureaus and we're going to regulate the hell out of
these upstart competitors of ours.
Now that's the most sophisticated notion of regulation, where it's the big businesses
that are ostensibly the victims of regulation who are actually favoring it and actually
So all these increased levels of bureaucracy, they drive away business from the upstarts
and they protect the business of the largest companies.
Right.
You see, and even the less sophisticated view of Obama, the capture theory, is absolutely
right.
There is some capture, but Obama and I draw the opposite conclusions from it.
But the conclusion of Obama draws some capture theory as well.
We've got to get in some impure regulators who will not be captured or will not be given
gifts or we have to stop this revolving door business that you mentioned and my attitude
is rocks a rock to that, that's the human commission.
The conclusion I draw from this character theory is not we need more and better regulators,
it's rather the marketplace is the best regulator.
Let's get rid of these regulatory agencies.
Let's get rid of the minerals management service.
Let's get rid of FEMA.
Let's get rid of the Army Corps of Engineers.
And let's let people like McDonald's and Border King and Microsoft and Google run these kinds
of things on the basis of markets.
I think, I mean, what's happened with the Minerals Management Service is that the agency
has changed names to the Bureau of Energy and Management of the Environment or something
like that, the BOE, and they've gotten a makeover.
They're going to be split into three separate bureaucracies so that they act as a watchdog
on one another, so this probably wouldn't stop the favors in the lobbying.
You don't see that happening.
Oh, and I think that's a very good point you're making.
You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the problem with public housing. We
used to have high-rise public housing. Now, the problem with public housing, as Jane Jacobs
tells us, is one, they don't allow any commerce there, which screws up the whole society.
And secondly, they have these income cutoffs, so that if you make more than a certain amount
of money, you're not qualified. And if you get a raise, you have to leave the public
Public Housing Projects, which means that most of the public housing projects are headed
by women who are unable to control the teenage boys. That's the problem with public housing.
But what these idiots derive from this is they said, well, the problem with public housing
is that it's high rise. So we've got to have low rise public housing, which is ridiculous,
because you have the same old income cutoffs and you have the same old lack of commerce,
Another thing, even if they were very, very moral and they did the right thing and they
believed in their job and they're serving the people, can a government body really truly
keep up with the technology of the oil industry, some of the newest and most complicated technologies
that Exists.
You see, what you really have is the problem of central planning.
And Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist, more than anyone else, showed that the problem
with central planning is, you know, it's insuperable.
You can't rationally plan your way out of a paper bag.
And even if we get rid of the superficial problems of capture and the Colco point about
the initiation of these regulations. Suppose you had regulators who were impenetrable,
who were not broadable. They were robots or whatever. Human beings said they were just
highly moral and they would never be suborned by gifts or anything like that. Still, they're
not part of the market. It's only when you're part of the market and you're part of the
price system that you can have a rational economy. These people have no way of telling
What is Appropriate? For example, because of left-wing environmentalists, BP had to drill
in very, very deep water. I think the water is about a mile deep. They would have preferred
to drill closer to the shore where the water is, say, 25 feet deep. I mean, look, if you
have a problem and you're dealing with 25 feet deep of water, it's a lot easier to solve
than if you're dealing with 6,000 feet of water, which is roughly a mile. Well, how
How would the regulators know what proportion of oil drilling should be done coast to shore
in shallow water or deep out in deep water?
Even if they're moral and they wouldn't accept bribes or they wouldn't be suborned or they
wouldn't be captured, this is an entrepreneurial decision.
And if the Gulf of Mexico Corporation made a mistake, well then they'd go broke and you
get someone who did a better job.
But if the BOE makes a mistake, do they lose money?
No.
So, they're not part of the market nexus. There's no reason to believe that even if they were highly moral, that they would succeed.
In other words, the morality is just a superficial criticism of this. There's a deeper criticism, and that's the economic criticism.
And the economic criticism is that these guys are flying blind. They have no way of knowing where to drill, what kind of drilling to do.
I had a good friend of mine who works in the natural gas industry and she spent a horrifying
several days with her regulator, her inspector going through all the various things that
they had to change just to meet code and did that make them safer?
This is the way the bureaucrats work.
They make arbitrary capricious rules and they insist that you follow them.
Let me give you another example from one of my recent books on privatizing roads.
I hope we're not coming up toward the break, but if we are, I guess we can continue it.
We've got a couple of minutes.
Now, the statistics on roads are that some 40,000 people a year die on the nation's highways.
Now, that's a big number. The U.S. servicemen in all the years that we were in Vietnam were only about 50,000 deaths.
And if you look at how many people are dying, U.S. servicemen, forget about Iraqis and Afghanis, we don't count their deaths.
But even US servicemen, just a couple of thousand, a 9-11 was only 3,000, Katrina was only 1,100 or 1,500. This is 40,000 people a year who bite the dust because of the goddamn socialist highways.
And is this on the news? Is Obama talking about this? No, no, no.
Of course not.
And what does the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration do?
They have all these stupid rules about seat belts and all sorts of silly things.
They have this thing, 70 mile an hour zone, and it's perfectly legal to drive at 65 miles
an hour in the left lane.
And most people in a 70 mile zone, they want to drive 75.
I mean, if you go on the highway and you go at 70 miles an hour, virtually every car is
now zipping right by you.
Okay, so here you've got some idiots sitting there in the left lane at 65, and he's just
tootling along, and he's creating a ruckus because cars are trying to wiggle in and out
to try to get past him, and, you know, as far as the highway is concerned, they come
up with these stupid signs on the road, how is that addressing the problem?
So this is very similar to what you're seeing. In other words, regulation is all of the piece, whether it's on the land, whether it's on the water, wherever it is, whether it's drugs, whether it's schools, you know, they've got stupid, arbitrary, capricious rules that they insist on happening.
The best example of this is the airplane travel. They steal our toothpaste, they steal our nail clippers, and they don't allow pilots to have guns.
It's just very silly. Where is what they should be doing in order to promote safety? Well, I'll talk about this after the break.
Coming up, we'll just have our short little wrap-up segment, so thank you Dr. Block.
We'll be right back from these commercial breaks.
Hello everybody, welcome back to Radio Free Market.
I'm here with Dr. Walter Block and before you got cut off, you were telling us how federal
regulations keep us safe in the air, so can you tell us more about that?
Well, actually, I was denying that.
Federal regulations don't really keep us safe.
They have these arbitrary and capricious things about a big toothpaste is no good, but a little
toothpaste is fine, and fasten your seat belts, and all these government regulation rules
and stuff that don't do much, they don't allow airline pilots to carry guns even though
most of them are ex-military, it's just crazy.
What they should do is get rid of this bureau, this government regulatory bureau, and let
Each airline implements its own policies. LR, the airline from Israel, has been under attack
more than most and they haven't had one problem. Maybe LR could rent out some of its people
to American airlines or what have you. I don't know. The problem is that if the safety board
of airlines makes a mistake, they don't pay for it. They don't go out of business. Whereas
of the World, The Theory of Money and Credit of the World, The Theory of Money and Credit
What's gone amuck with this latest BP spill is the fact that Obama put a moratorium on
an entire industry that props up the whole gulf.
What kind of message do you think this sends to oil companies?
Well, it's a very bad message.
My friend Bob Higgs, who lives around here, said, look, you know, industry is dangerous.
You know, farmers get hurt by tractors and we don't have sweatshops anymore.
We don't have Dickens kinds of factories, but people still get hurt in factories, people
get hurt fishing.
You know, just because you have a mess, you know, we're denied perfection.
We don't have, we're not on the right side of the Garden of Eden for perfection.
So when you have a problem and you just ban the entire industry, well that's another instance
of regulation going crazy.
Look, Congress passes bad laws. Should we get rid of Congress? Wait, maybe that's a good idea.
Yeah, that could work. So how do you ultimately see this bill being politicized, meaning how do you see it affecting energy policy in this country?
What's that expression, that a tragedy is a bad thing to waste?
Oh, and the crisis, I thought it was.
Crisis is a bad thing to waste. What you have to do is pile on more regulation. That's what they're going to do.
They just need an excuse for more regulation, and this is certainly an excuse.
We're going to have more regulation, we're going to have more left-wing environmentalists as opposed to free enterprise environmentalists
running around trying to run everyone's business.
Happily, Obama's approval ratings aren't that good, so maybe that'll slow him down a bit.
Yeah, maybe we'll get the next regulatory agency in the coming four years.
Anyway I'd like to thank you Dr. Walter Block for being with us and being my guest. I'm guest host Zoe Russell and this is Radio Free Market. Please visit us on the web at RadioFreeMarket.com where you can download this and all of our shows for free. So until next week wherever you are please stand up for freedom and thank you for listening.