Authority, Responsibility and Accountability | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary

Authority, Responsibility and Accountability | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary: "BP stockholders are being severely punished because of the failure of BP's management to prevent this crisis — and you can bet many heads will roll at BP. Yet how many heads will roll in the U.S. government, which had the responsibility to make sure BP operated safely and that the beaches and marshes were protected? Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had been asking the federal government for permission to build barrier sandbars to protect the marshes, but the Obama administration dithered for weeks in making a decision, and now the oil is in the marshes.

Those who want more government ignore the fact that the U.S. government, on a daily basis, seems unable to do the simplest tasks. For instance, how often have you had to wait in line 40 minutes to buy something at Wal-Mart or McDonald's? The answer is probably never, because you can choose to go somewhere else, and companies like Wal-Mart are acutely aware of this, so they work hard to minimize waiting times by developing elaborate statistical programs to determine how many employees they are likely to need to service the customers in a reasonably short time. They manage to do this even though they never know exactly how many customers they will have at a given time.

Now, contrast this with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). These two agencies know precisely the number of passengers who will be showing up, and when. Their task is simple compared to that of almost all retailers, but they cannot seem to manage it — because no one is held accountable for the failure to treat airline passengers in a civil manner and respect the fact that their time is valuable."