Elections Matter: Oil Gusher Edition

June 3, 2010

In times of war and disaster, abstract concerns about the size of government are appropriately ignored. One would hope that people would always bear in mind the risks of such catastrophes when evaluating the governing philosophies of candidates for office. That is, if anybody ever actually makes an honest and open-minded evaluation of candidates’ governing philosophies, I’d hope that such risks would be taken into consideration.

Ezra Klein writes:

So though Obama deserves to take his lumps on this one, Americans should take the lesson of recent disasters, from the financial crisis to the BP spill to Katrina, and realize that they actually like having good regulators and they get upset when their regulators fail them. Which might mean it’s a good idea to elect people who are interested in making sure regulators don’t stop doing their jobs every couple of years, as opposed to people who think that the best regulation is no regulation, and the second-best regulation is whatever the relevant industry tells them it is.

Effective government is about ends and means. It requires taking both seriously. To ensure public safety and prosperity, we need regulation adequate to those ends. Elections matter.

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