Should we blame big government for the BP oil spill?

A friend recently e-mailed me this article by Dee Dee Myers on the BP oil spill. She argues that--despite the fact that big government appears to have done virtually nothing to prevent or clean up the oil spill--we have no other alternative but to rely on big government. She asks "What aspect of the endlessly unfolding disaster off the Louisiana coast would have been made better with less government?" The answer is that quite a few aspects might have been made considerably better.

Certainly, we need some government and some regulations. But how much government and what kinds of regulations would be most beneficial? In this case, having less government bureaucracy may not have done much to help clean up the spill. But since the huge bureaucracy we have appears to have been impotent to either prevent or solve the problem, it at least seems reasonable to raise the question of why we should be spending all of those tax-payers' dollars to pay the salaries of so many useless bureaucrats. Could we be making better use of that money? Perhaps we could be using it to reduce the national debt or to provide tax relief to help stimulate the economy.

What I'm primarily concerned with in this particular case, however, are the unintended adverse consequences of government regulations. For example, if environmental laws had been more lax, it may have actually been better for both the environment and the economy, as paradoxical as that may seem to big-government advocates. Perhaps BP and other oil companies would have been able to drill more wells on land and in shallower waters closer to shore. And maybe they would have drilled fewer expensive, risky deep-water wells, in which it's much harder to plug leaks. Another concern I have is that--due to the political fallout from this BP spill--the government may make it even harder to get drilling permits. An unintended consequence of that would be that we'd have to bring in more imported oil in tankers. But the safety record for transporting oil in tankers is significantly worse than for offshore drilling. So, besides increasing energy prices and the trade deficit, banning more drilling could actually increase the amount of oil that ends up being spilled.