The President of the United States is supposed to be a leader and hopefully a wise one.  One of the classic roots of wisdom is experience. As the current holder of the office, we elected a man who, regardless of his gifts as a communicator, had absolutely no executive experience whatsoever. He is a political being and has never started a company or ran one.  In fact, in numerous utterances and even in his own book he has said that he views the private sector as "the other side".  This is a man for whom government is the preferred choice to fix and run things.

The problem is that for a person of experience and wisdom, this point of view is just plain silly.  The shortest list in the world, is that of efficient government programs.  Government efficiency is an oxymoron, yet politicians of both parties and especially this president, have said over and over again that they want to make government more efficient as opposed to just stopping its huge over-reach in trying to run everything.  Only a sucker would continue to fall for this line and there must be a lot of suckers in our country.  Hoping for the government to do anything right is a triumph of hope over reason.

That brings me to the Gulf Spill.  BP is working night and day, spending billions of dollars to cap this thing and clean up the mess.  Already in place are 600 employees who are sorting through now 42,000 claims of folks hurt by the disaster economically.  They have processed, to date,  20,000 of these claims and are going through the rest at record pace.  BP has already said that it is ignoring the $75 million cap set by Congress back in 1990 as the cap on damage claims, and they have a strong incentive to get the settlements right with claimants, as they will sue the pants off BP if they feel wronged.  Heck, it is a feeding frenzy already – as now lawyers move to file suits on behalf of those who want even more. 

So, why are Congress and the president saying they want to form some sort of fund with $20 billion of BP's money to compensate those hurt when the company is doing a good job already? Politics!  They want to be able to show that they are doing something.  The thing is what they want to do is illegal, government has no right to demand money from private industry, BP is the  most important company of our closest ally, Great Britain, and all this beating up is causing huge problems between our two countries, and at the very bottom line, why would a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats who have no skin in the game do a better job of compensating victims than the company responsible who has every motive to clean this mess up and get it all put to bed?  They wouldn't.  Don't confuse politics with what is best for those truly hurt and all of us should be very angry at the blatant disregard for the rule of law.  We ignore it at our peril and the unintended consequences are going to be very, very bad.  Watch carefully; we are witnessing a classic government caused SNAFU, which for all of you too young to know it is an acronym from WWII: Situation Normal, All Fudged Up.

And yet we never learn......