It's Not That You're Wrong. You're Just Evil.

by Daily Kos | Fri Jul 02, 2010

I think right now every oil company in the world says, I don’t want to pay $100 million a day to cut corners on drilling a well. And that’s where I believe the market system works. Nobody’s got more to lose in this deal than BP.  -- Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi

Others have already pointed out the fallacies and political stupidity inherent in this particular bit of insanity from the estimable governor of the great state of Mississippi.  Hearing it on the radio yesterday, it was difficult to decide whether to laugh or cringe.

But the problem isn't that Mr. Barbour is wrong about the nature of markets and responsible actors, or that he is politically obtuse.  The problem is that his statement perfectly fits the definition of moral evil, and exemplifies everything that is wrong with conservative economic philosophy.

Let us, for a moment, take Mr. Barbour at his word.  Let us assume, contrary to our experience after Exxon-Valdez, Ixtoc and every financial crisis created by market bubbles and excessive leverage for hundreds of years since they started selling tulips in the Netherlands, that after an egregious negative event, market forces will self-correct, and companies worried about their bottom lines will ensure that such an event never happens again.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, the preposterous notion that BP and their shareholders are the greatest victims of this disaster, even as an environmental and economic catastrophe of national and quite possibly global proportions continues to worsen each day.

Now what?  Even if Mr. Barbour's assumptions were correct, what does that leave us with?

It leaves us with moral evil.  In fact, it is the worst sort of moral evil a politician can exercise.

Bribery, kickbacks, extortion, backstabbing, deceit, personal moral failings and corruption of all kinds are generally what we consider to be the chief evils associated with politicians.  They're what give politicians and politics itself a bad name.  But these flaws, while severe, are rarely fatal.  Moreover, they tend to exist at every stratum of society.

The true danger in politics is when people in power elevate ideological purity over their basic humanity, empathy, and common sense.  This danger is as present on the Left as it is on the Right.  From Stalin to Hitler, from Pol Pot to Pinochet, from the Crusades to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, by far the greatest evils perpetrated by persons in power are done out of rigid and passionate commitment to ideology.  The brutal human consequences of that ideology are ignored or justified as subservient to the perceived greater good of whatever Utopian ideal happens to be in vogue.

In Haley Barbour's case, and in the case of the entire modern Republican Party, the lives and livelihoods of millions are merely unfortunate collateral damage on the way to the free market Utopia envisioned by Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.

If the entire world's economy must collapse to teach a few financial institutions about the dangers of leverage, then so be it.

If an entire Gulf must be suffocated in putrid oil to teach a few oil companies a lesson about rig safety, then so be it.

If the infrastructure of entire countries must continue in disrepair for years and entire wars must be lost while we work out the kinks of hiring private contractors for the job of nation building, then so be it.

If millions of Americans must suffer and die so that a few private health insurance institutions may continue to shell out dividends to their shareholders as God and Adam Smith intended, then so be it.

And so on.  We must suffer these inconveniences, after all, or how will we ever reach the Utopia of total freedom and perfect market balance?

This is moral evil of the most perilous kind.  It is an inhuman pathology that creeps up only occasionally in great civilizations--but when it does, it can be more devastating than the sum of hundreds of years of petty graft and political corruption.

Sadly, it is this Utopian pathology which has overtaken the modern GOP.  It is not only disturbingly wrong, politically naive and factually misguided.  It is incredibly dangerous.