With the Gulf oil leak: the state was revealed, once again, as utterly incompetent at anything but taxing and making war, that is, stealing and murdering. It was funny to hear Progs urging Obama to seize personal control and fix everything. He doesn’t want the political responsibility, of course, but in any event, the state employs no one with any such ability, and if it did, he would soon be useless, thanks to the environment of public property. All the state can do is grab other people’s money and use some of it to hire favored private contractors. Virtually all its millions of uncivil servants are good only at being busybodies, and armed ones at that. Of course, there are states that do everything themselves, like the USSR, but the inevitable result is deep poverty and the destruction of civilization, and even in totalitarian regimes, only black markets make the difference between a poor life and an immediate death for non-rulers.

BTW, good for TPM for noting that natural oil spills (called seeps) dump roughly four Exxon Valdezes into the Gulf each year. But since the seeps are not man-associated, they are ignored. And good for BP for having stopped that tragic loss of crude from its well, though the real tragedy will be far more state intervention in energy, and a poorer world as a result.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.