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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs

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To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (43724)	6/9/2010 9:23:14 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 71588

I never said they would always do the right thing. I said (using different words, it was an implication not a direct statement) that market incentives would contribute more to stopping the leak than government. The main counterargument - The courts are part of the government, liability can reasonably be seen as a free market consequence, but its is actually imposed in most cases by a branch of the government. OTOH even defining the liability as a government activity, the liability creates the market incentive, so you could in this sense say the government creates the incentive, but is actually the desire for profit (and loss avoidance) that motivates spending a lot of money and effort on stopping the leak. BP is going to stop it sooner or later, and they will do so because its in their best financial (profit/loss) interest. So Cesca snark about "How Soon Until the Free Market Stops the Oil Spill?" is unwarranted. (If he had instead said "how well did the free market prevent the leak?" than he would be on more reasonable ground. But even here its not so simple. The profit motive provides a big incentive to try to avoid such incidents.)

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