Quote:
Originally Posted by cmac2012
One point of it for me is that the free market will not police itself. There's money to made in taking risks. After the Ex. Valdez, the Santa Barbara spill, and the Ixtec spill (for starters) you would think the industry would know that public displeasure at oil spills, fouled beaches, etc. could result in loss of access to future drilling.
This was apparently not high on their list of concerns. Maddow put an exclamation point on the issue. The first guy did seem a bit cocky but the subsequent guests struck me as solid.
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That's a rather simplistic indictment of free markets.
They can and do police themselves. They prepare for emergencies. Sometimes their preparations end up as being inadequate. Sometimes "assumptions" are wrong, but that speaks to the individuals involved; not the weakness of free markets.
Thinking back a few years to the failures of the Apollo 1 spacecraft that resulting in the deaths of the three astronauts. That project was under the strictest of government controls, regulation, oversight and cooperation, yet three men died. The response from the free market contractors resulted in a superior spacecraft.
The alternative to free markets, is of course, top-down, government-controlled, markets. For examples of how well that works, compare the Tatra, or any of the cars made for the masses under the Soviet regime, to any car produced for the masses in any free market country.