David Warren: Bush had a a competent staff to deal with Katrina, while Obama "has loaded up a ship of fools"

We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed.

So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can't accept, and therefore don't ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand. This is amusing, in a way: a memorable illustration of ... the sort of stuff I keep going on about. Which is to say, the law of unintended consequences, which pertains with especial virulence to all acts of government regulation.

Reagan and Thatcher were eloquent on this, but made little progress against entrenched interests. My reader may imagine exactly what entrenched interest keeps the Jones Act in place. A large part of the function of all regulatory bureaucracies is granting exemptions to the moronic rules. This, in turn, creates the conditions for massive corruption, and in the case at hand, the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" -- regulators and regulatees working hand-in-glove.

It is the stuff that brilliant Scottish moralist, Adam Smith, warned us against back in 1776. A "symbiotic relationship" tends to evolve, in 100 per cent of cases, between the big businesses that dominate an industry, and the big government that regulates them. They share such common interests as eliminating competition.

Now, an exemption can be granted even to the Jones Act: by executive order, all the way to the top. This was granted, promptly, by the Bush administration, when it was organizing the rescue arrangements that responsible local authorities had failed to provide, at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Which was, incidentally, a vastly larger environmental catastrophe than the piddling oil leak that now commands the news.

But the Bush administration had a huge advantage over its successor. Bush had gone out of his way to find competent people, with experience of their fields, to staff his administration. Many were despised throughout the media for their known conservative tendencies, but what can you do? For another axiom of David Warren Thought is that everyone is conservative, in a field he knows something about.

Reciprocally, there is a tendency to sport more and more liberal views, the greater one's ignorance of a field (and therefore of its constraints). And let me note, caustically, that President Obama is pretty liberal right across the board.

Bush had not, as his successor has, loaded up a ship of fools consisting of academic ideologues, under no particular direction from a captain who is himself off playing golf, and partying with America's coolest people. Which is exactly what Obama was doing for weeks after April 20, when Deepwater Horizon blew up; though to be fair we should also mention the fundraisers and commencement speeches. But there is little evidence that, away from his TelePrompTer, he does anything except appoint more fools to run the government for him.