ICYMI: Government Hubris Leads to Unnecessary Regulations

By Daniel Kish — 2/16/2013 President Obama has been seeing off loyal retainers from his first term, and recently he bid adieu to Steven Chu, his in-house Nobel Laureate and secretary of energy. In doing so, the president praised Mr. Chu for “designing a cap to plug a hole in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico when nobody else could figure it out.” This was in reference to the 2010 BP oil spill known as “Deepwater Horizon.” The problem is, Mr. Chu did not design the containment cap; the hardworking engineers of BP and its private sector contractors did that, working night and day from the moment of the disaster. Any energy business that had expertise offered to help, and many did. Mr. Chu is a brilliant man and has done the world a service by his work in optical physics, including his Nobel prize work involving light and atoms. Still, Mr. Obama giving him credit for the cap fits perfectly with the central conceit of liberalism in general, and the dangerous path down which Mr. Obama is leading the nation. When the president shouted out, “You did not build that” during the latest campaign, he was echoing a central tenet of the liberal credo: Government — not free citizens or the businesses or works they create — is responsible for the progress that Americans have achieved over the last two centuries. Government can set and enforce rules that enable individuals and businesses to take risks, innovate, invest, succeed and fail. Yet government itself does not build or create wealth; even those things it does build only come from revenues it coercively takes from individuals and businesses to be spent on what politicians deem popular at the moment…

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