Under what authority does this president make it illegal for business to do business? Under the same grant of power that allows him to force individuals to buy a product, presumably. The result of BHO’s six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is that companies are beginning to depart. After all, it costs millions to sit idle. Wait a sec, perhpas the next step the encroaching state can take is to forbid the companies to leave. Ludwig von Mises warned that the road to socializing the means of production was paved with interventionism.
Yahoo News:
“Already, three rigs have left or are in the process of leaving the Gulf of Mexico,” Chett Chiasson, executive director of the port commission for the town of Port Fourchon, which services 90 percent of deepwater activity in the Gulf, told AFP. “If this moratorium goes for six months, these rig operators and these oil companies will have no choice but to go somewhere else,” with a devastating impact on jobs and the economy of Louisiana and the rest of the United States…”
WND reports that the scary James Carville “told CNN’s John King, ‘This president needs to tell BP, ‘I’m your daddy, I’m in charge. You’re going to do what we say.'”
Carville has tapped into a dominant sentiment among Americans—unless the networks are interviewing an unrepresentative minority.
To explain why he wanted money and lots of if from BP, one such mundane mind told one of the networks, “We are the parent; PB the child. We want to punish the child but not to make him leave the house.”
The other reason he gave: we live day-to-day here. I guess this will be a valid basis upon which to join the claims process. Right there you see what the problem is with a Chicago-style shake down, as opposed the legal claims process, where at least some evidence must be presented.
The “goose in folklore laid a golden egg a day until its greedy owner killed it in an attempt to get all the gold at once.”
UPDATE (June 22): TOO-BIN THE TIT (tit as in a “despicable or unpleasant person). Last night, the Alpha Female of CNN, Anderson Cooper, called on his legal analyst, Jeffrey Too-bin, to confirm what is known to every left-liberal with an opinion on how the law should work, but no knowledge of how it works (that’s tit Too-bin).
Too-bin was to predict whether New Orleans District Court Judge Martin Feldman would leave or lift “the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.”
Tit was ponderous. He shook his curly pelt and indicated that BHO’s decree was so reasonable he could not envisage its overturn. And, in any case, the Powers That Be had wide discretion such as was seldom challenged by the Courts. It was all good, promised Too-bin. I made a mental note to revisit the tit when Feldman rendered the right ruling.
Contra the Too-bin, my instinct (located in my head) was that Judge Martin Feldman would indeed do what he did:
Issue “a temporary injunction Tuesday, lifting the moratorium and accusing [Interior Secretary Ken] Salazar of ‘arbitrary and capricious’ behavior that will cause ‘irreparable harm’ to 33 other deepwater oil rigs that the government unfairly assumes are unsound, despite the fact that all of them have been reinspected since the BP blowout on May 28.” [Washington Examiner]
Here is the Cooper/Too-bin tet`-a-tete´. Coming from an analyst, the Us vs. Them language is unbelievable:
Sorting it out tonight: CNN’s senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, who joins us from New York.
Jeff, what the companies bringing this suit — what do they have to prove to get the moratorium overturned?
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SR. LEGAL ANALYST: They have to prove that the action by the Obama administration was arbitrary and capricious, it was simply an irrational act to do this. That’s a very tough standard to meet but that’s what they have — that’s what they’re trying to show.
COOPER: And Bobby Jindal, the governor here, he filed a brief along with the plaintiffs, saying the moratorium basically will turn an environmental disaster into an economic catastrophe. Those were his words. That’s really an economic argument he’s making.
TOOBIN: That’s right. It’s important to remember that the judge has a very narrow function in this case. He doesn’t have to decide whether it’s a good idea to have this moratorium or not. Judge Feldman’s (ph) job only is to decide whether the Obama administration was legally within its rights in establishing this moratorium. And it is legally within its rights as long as it acts in a rational way. That’s a very broad standard.
The economic arguments that Bobby Jindal made, you know, 4,000 jobs lost directly, 10,000 jobs lost indirectly. Those are arguments to be made to the Obama administration saying, don’t do this, it’s a bad idea. I don’t see how a court is going to take those arguments and say, well, that makes this beyond the pale legally.
COOPER: Yes. Essentially you’re saying the judge isn’t ruling on whether these rigs are safe or not, or whether that even matters. All he’s ruling on is the state of mind that the president had when he made this decision?
TOOBIN: Well, it’s not so much the state of mind — about whether there is a reasonable justification, whether the act of establishing this moratorium is a reasonable response. And when you have an economic — an environmental catastrophe like we’ve seen, shutting down these rigs for six months does not seem to me — and I suspect will not seem to the judge — as an irrational response.
Now, the companies — and Bobby Jindal points out, that a lot of these rigs that are being shut down, have passed their safety inspections. So why shut them down? That means it’s an irrational act to shut them down.
The government responds to that by saying, look, the Deepwater Horizon, it passed its inspections. That shows that the safety inspections aren’t good enough. We need the six months to fix the system. That’s an argument I think that’s going to be very tough to respond to.
COOPER: So, you think the judge is going to leave the moratorium in place?
TOOBIN: I think it’s very likely. When it comes to these sorts decisions where an administrative agency has a lot of discretion, judges are very reluctant to step in at the last minute and stop it, because they figure the agency has the expertise. The law gives the agency a certain amount of discretion. It would take an extreme irrational act to get a judge to stop it, and a six-month moratorium — and remember, it’s only six months, it’s not forever — I think is not something that the judge — that most judges would view as irrational.
COOPER: All right. Jeff Toobin, I appreciate it.
[SNIP]
We’ve gone from Too-bin to too-good. Yes!
