In the U.S. Constitutional Convention, James Madison in particular stressed the nepharious quality of faction in relation to the public good. He argued that if a republic is extended in scope sufficently that there are more factions, none of them would be able to dominate and the public good would emerge. In a republic in which there are only a few major parties, the people's perspectives can become delimited by the parties' paradigms in an either-or dual macro-framework. That is to say, societal blind-spots can exist. To the extent that both BP and the relevant U.S. Government regulatory agency, MMS, were both culpable in the Deep Water Horizon rig explosion in 2010, both the Republican defense of business and the Democratic defense of government fall short. Even so, these respective defenses went on undaunted in the wake of the disaster and in the next year. To be sure, old paradigms die hard.
Albeit an oversimplification, it can be said that the Democratic party in the United States stresses the power of business as the problem, whereas the Republican party there views the problem as being government. In campaigning for President in 1980, Ronald Reagan bluntly said that government was indeed the problem. Deregulation ensued and industry self-regulation was like a fad. The idea was that the checks and balances in goverment that protect the liberties of the citizens could be applied at the industry level such firms would provide a check on eachother automatically. Lost in the buzz was the extent to which an industry would be willing to sacrifice its own long-term viability in order to protect even the bad among its own.
In 2010, the Republican paradigm whereas business is good and government is bad resulted in some Republican office holders defending a piriah (BP) and continuing to urge deregulation in order to excoreate against the US Government and frustrate the Obama Administration. The ranking Republican on the US House Energy and Commerce committee apologized to BP’s CEO for the “shakedown” by Obama in extracting a $20 billion fund for the claims in the Gulf region. Meanwhile, Democrats were hard-pressed to admit that a goverment regulatory agency, namely MMS, could be so inept and corrupt. It was not so much a matter of more regulations being needed; rather, the problem was government regulation itself.
Democrats could point to the encroaching nature of big business over the regulators, but absent a shakedown in the size of the biggest companies, the wherewithal of the regulators not to “partner up” with the regulatees may be an intractable problem in government regulation. The traditional argument in capture theory that regulators depend on their respective industries for information doesn’t even break a sweat in what is needed to explain the extent of the power of big business over government regulatory agencies. The imbalance of power is systemic: government officials being too feckless and corrupt. and big business being too powerful for the good of the republic. In their letters, Jefferson and Adams agree on the need for a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, rather than the artifical sort of wealth and birth. Absent a natural aristocracy, systems whether business or government, cannot but be ineffective and corrupt.
In 2010, BP’s sordid safety record and its explosion in the Gulf of Mexico challenged the paradigms of both parties. In actuality, business and goverment, as well as business and government, contain problems that exceed and transcend a particular paradigm. In treating the two party paradigms as a dichotomy, we miss the interaction effect that exists among the respective sectors’ problems. It might be that the founders were correct in their suspicion of factionalism, as it does indeed detract from the common good. Where a paradigm keeps one from acknowledging problems that are in the radar of an “opposing” paradigm, a person is not apt to serve the public interest. In other words, both paradigms are limited. The BP-MMS interaction and the subsequent explosion and responses exposed the delimited nature of the partisan paradigms.
For more on MMS, see Cases of Unethical Business, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.
