On "The view" right now the girls are discussing BP and what can be done to prevent such an oil spill as that of which is occurring the the Gulf Coast from occurring again. Whoopie said more regulations are needed, and that conservative girl said regulations are fine but not so many that the government is running the company.
So, who is right? Actually, I think Whoopie is way off. You have to think of regulations as rules. The more rules you have the harder they are to enforce. Likewise, as you have too many rules, it's impossible to follow some of them. And big businesses like BP know this, and therefore they find ways to skirt them.
I can use myself as a perfect example. I have a bunch of rules I have for my children to abide by. One of the rules is wearing a helmet while riding a bike, and another is to look both ways before crossing the road, and another is to not talk back, and another is...
Well, you get the picture. For their safety, we parents come up with lots of rules. Yet, there comes a time when you are working so hard to get your child to obey one rule that it becomes necessary to forgo another. For example, my daughter threw a fit the other day at the park, and she was refusing to get back on her bike if she had to wear a helmet.
She said, "I never fall off my bike anyway. So why do I have to wear this stupid thing?"
To get her to cooperate, I decided to let her not wear the helmet. My point here is not to make myself look like a bad parent, but to make the point that sometimes you have to let one rule slide in order to get people to cooperate. And you can't tell me inspectors do the same thing, or say something like, "Oh, there hasn't been a leak in 20 years, so we'll just let this go by."
Too many rules to enforce makes this a lot more likely to happen. Too many rules to enforce make it a lot harder to abide by them.
Likewise, history has proven that the more regulations on a particular industry the greater the likelihood that smaller corporations and businesses cannot afford the regulations, and go out of business.
So then you have only large corporations left, like B.P. With little competition left, corporations like B.P. have to spend less money on competition, so they have more money left over to fund lobbyists, and to make campaign contributions, all in an attempt to control Washington and to make sure no laws are made to increase competition.
Thus, the irony of "more regulations" as Whoopie would have it is the more regulations you have on an industry, the more control that industry has on Washington. In this way, Washington and that Industry become one. Which, ultimately, is the goal of Progressivism, to control industry.
Also, consider that it's because of regulations that we can't drill in the Florida Tundra; regulations that say we can't dig new coal mines; regulations that we can't build new oil refineries; regulations we can't build new nucular power plants; and therefore regulations that force oil to drill off the gulf coast so deep we can't get to the spill to plug it up.
Plus BP had plans to use chemicals to get rid of oil, and to burn it, before it got out of reach of the well, but environmental regulations prevented this action too. There's so many regulations you can't prevent and you can't treat.
I thought it was ironic today that Obama said the following: America deserves an answer. What happened in Gulf may be the result of human error, and it may be the result of error on the part of BP. Either way, America deserves an answer.
Obama is right, except for one thing: he failed to mention the government as a possible cause.
So this is exactly the problem as I see it. I could be wrong. I might be completely wrong, yet I don't see how more regulations are going to work. What we need to do is have few regulations -- few rules -- and enforce then wholeheartedly.
The same in the home. While there are a lot of rules to run a home, I tend to just have a few that I consider nuclear laws, and I enforce them tooth and nail. You can have a lot of freedom in my home, yet if you break these nuclear laws you will be punished wholeheartedly and appropriately.
The same needs to be done in Washington.
You know, the irony of this is that when it comes to Immigration progressives are the exact opposite: they want fewer regulations. They want poor immigrants to come into this country, and to take advantage of U.S. welfare programs because then they'll tend to vote democrat.
So, when something works in the favor of progressives, they don't want more regulations. As we know, the U.S. government immigration policy is much tougher than the recent Arizona policy. Yet the Arizona policy encourages enforcement of current immigration laws, while the federal government enforces little.
Why is that? Because there are too many rules. It comes full circle. Too many regulations make industries worse, not better. Worded another way: regulations are meant to control industry, yet history has shown regulations on industry encourage industry to control Washington.
Ironic isn't it. Your thoughts?
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