That said, the most worrisome long-term economic impact of the Gulf spill lies elsewhere: The catastrophe is adding to the gradual erosion in trust in U.S. professional elites and major institutions, from government to business. It has hardly inspired confidence to watch the White House scramble to prove that President Barack Obama wasn’t as detached from the crisis as he often seemed, or to witness the inability of the world’s best oil engineers to stop the underwater gusher.
Confidence in the economy’s commanding heights has taken a beating following a long run of scandals and malfeasance. The list includes everything from the Enron and Worldcom failures, Bernie Madoff’s massive fraud, the subprime loan mess, the government rescues of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG (AIG), the controversy surrounding Goldman Sachs’ (GS) collateralized debt obligations, and so on. The Tea Party movement may grab all the attention with its antigovernment rhetoric, but surveys have repeatedly shown that its sentiment is widely shared. For instance, a series of long-run surveys by the Pew Research Center find that only 22 percent of those surveyed say they can trust government. That’s about the lowest measure in half a century. The ratings are similarly abysmal for large corporations and banks and other financial institutions: respectively 25 percent and 22 percent.
Trust isn’t as easy to measure as land, labor, and capital. It’s more like a recipe or a software protocol that allows for economic exchange and all kinds of innovation. Nobel Prize Laureate Kenneth Arrow famously remarked that “virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.” Societies with high levels of trust are fertile ground for developing large corporations and innovative enterprises. Low-trust societies feature people who don’t like to do business with folks outside their family or community; smaller, family-run companies are the norm.
The Federal Government on all levels is a liar and operating outside the Constitution. A good way to restore trust would be for the Government to operate within its appointed limits.
Picking up on your mention of the Federal Government, #1, I want to mention that an obvious omission through much of the coverage and hoopla over the BP oil spill seemed to be any discussion of regulatory agencies’ role, a governmental function. When regulators interact constructively with resource industry companies disasters are often avoided, and a deserved atmosphere of public trust develops. I suspect in the USA regulators of resource development are uneven, at best. Under Bush they were possibly too lax, and in any case the necessary tightening didn’t take place quickly enough after 2008 for any federal agency to be on top of what BP were doing that wasn’t up to par. Sadly I think this may have been by design, but that’s another matter. In the case of the blow-out of April 20, it was also the case that the safety culture of BP itself had been undermined for a couple decades, apparently to cream some cash to put into their alternative energy development plans – see for example Wikipedia on (Lord) John Browne the ‘Sun King’ and former CEO – so between their sub-par behavior and that of regulatory agencies, a preventable technical disaster wasn’t prevented.
Trust is being put in the wrong places in the modern world full of gadgetry and constant innovation and smiling faces with confident voices promising things to people, or over-confident managers ordering underlings, with too little accountability. The only way these things work correctly is by maintaining all systems in a state of constant alertness and vigilance, as any mine-site engineer for instance knows, but instead people check if things are working and then go off and assume they’ll get a signal of impending trouble, or that they can rely on information not verified. Trust, but verify! day in, day out, and it’s a lot of hard work to do that. There are now more layers of technology and computer-based decision making between any two people doing a job or making a transaction, and this makes trouble at least as often as it saves any trouble, in my experience. Yet people are encouraged to place trust in the non-human parts of the system.
Just wait until it makes its way through the once reliably good US health care scene…..
And let’s not forget why BP and others are drilling in 5000ft of water where the challanges to do things on the fly are horrendus. The reason? The Progressive’s love of all things environmentally liberal which serve to beat down the evil private sector.
If that well had been in 300 feet of water this thing would have been over within days. If it had been on land, it would have been a one-day news story.
#3 would let BP get away with practices that other oil companies rejected. The fact is that they went on the cheap, and didn’t care about what the consequences would be. We’re sinners, and there are consequences to that.
Why trust a big government that invades a country on the flimsiest of pretenses? Why trust it when it can’t handle Katrina and doesn’t have the technology to handle this environmental mess? Why trust businesses like Enron, Long Term Capital Management, and the many other institutions who take advantage of their size to squash the little guy?
I will say that state governments are not much better, Brother Michael. Lots of corruption there. And plenty of local governments are rife with cronyism. There used to be a time that patriots thought that serving the government of the United States was a good thing. Not since Reagan, when a patriot realized that making money was more important than serving the country.
If you hate the federal government, you won’t get a competent government.
RE: “There used to be a time that patriots thought that serving the government of the United States was a good thing.”
No. Patriots believed that serving the *country* was a good thing. And the country ain’t “the government” thank God.
RE: “If you hate the federal government, you won’t get a competent government.”
Oh, I think it’s been well-demonstrated that if you *love* the federal government, and wish to expand it and balloon it and violate the Constitution as much as ever you possibly can by making the government responsible for far more than it should be and by snatching power and freedom from individuals . . . you won’t get a competent government.
Which is why, of course, we need as little of it as we can get by with — which limits happily were nicely outlined by our Constitution.
John, I have no problem with Constitutional Government. And why trust a Government that allows a foreign country to invade it and then sues the State which tries to protect its own borders. If the Feds did what they had to do and didn’t do what they are not supposed to do we would be much better off. It’s socialists like you with your dreams of European style socialism and Marxism and unbridled government control that are the problem.
#4JP, there ain’t no such thing as oil drilling in a mile of water “on the cheap”. All those “obscene profits” you folks wail about make it possible to put up the billions for such exploration and development. You push the oil companies out into such waters and then bash them when things go wrong.
You can’t work at the edge of the envelope without getting burned once in awhile. That is why we lost 2 space shuttles and ~15 crewmembers. You learn from those awful incidents and try to do better. The whole oil industry will learn from this and the technology will get better and more robust. And it won’t be because of Government regulation. It will be due to private company innovation, so that no matter what the playing field demands, they can do it and make a profit in the process.
And another thing people miss in this on-going mess: when the oil comes ashore it is an environmental disastor. When it stays out to sea it is an environmental problem. The one competant thing the Government could have done is move heaven and earth to keep it off the shorelines. Can’t even get that part right! Just two days ago, the Coasties were holding vacuum barges in port here until they did the PFD and fire extinguisher certs. There is “Govmint hep” for you!
And one way, Sarah, not the only way, is to serve in the government for the sake of the public. It’s one reason people serve as police; as regulators; NASA; the Peace Core. Its not the only reason. Of course the country is not the government. I wouldn’t make that equivalence. The government is one part of the country. It’s not a foreign institution. It’s ours. (“ours,” however, sounds a bit socialistic, I admit. Sorry).
I admit, Br. Michael, I don’t understand a word you’re saying. It sounds like you can’t tell a difference between Marxism and socialism. And then you discuss Europe. I’m guessing you don’t like Europe. Have you been? I admit I don’t share your animosity, in part because I still have family there, and they find our style of government a bit militaristic and… mean-spirited. And they vote Conservative / Christian Democrat. But conservatives in Europe, I suppose, might as well be Marxists in this country.
It seems to me you believe in “American Exceptionalism.” My own view is that if citizens in the US want more government involvement, they have the right to elect their officials to do what they want. It is the states, not an activist judiciary, that should decide these policies.
I think that you get what you ask for. If you don’t expect government to administer very well, it won’t. If you elect people who don’t approve of government, they won’t take responsibility. In other countries, smart people are encouraged – as a matter of national pride – to serve. It’s a cultural issue, and in this country there was a shift, with the 60’s kids distrusting a government that lied about Vietnam, and the 80’s kids believing that Greed is Good.
I also note oblique references to the Constitution. Well, the constitution says several things, and it seems that sometimes parts have different emphases. it’s not a math equation, where you plug in the context and come out with a solution. It a tradition of reason, where we figure out the best option between two different strands. Sometimes we strengthen equality, or due process, sometimes we protect liberty, rather than security. But we examine these issues via the institutions we live with – the judiciary, congress, and the executive power. It seems to me that conservatives would traditionally have held these institutions with some respect. Not, I suppose, after 1994.
RE: “And one way, Sarah, not the only way, is to serve in the government for the sake of the public.”
I completely agree — which is why I disagreed with this line: “There used to be a time that patriots thought that serving the government of the United States was a good thing.â€
When one serves within government one is not “serving the government” — one is [if one is following our Constitutional limits] serving the [i]country[/i].
“Serving the government” is, of course, just what collectivists approve of.
RE: “Well, the constitution says several things . . . ”
And fortunately, it is uniform on the limits of the federal government.