This article on the BP oil spill is pretty sickening to read. If I tried to quote select passages, I’d just end up copy and pasting the whole thing. Basically, it’s sorely evident BP made decisions that, while you can’t prove they caused the disaster, they do lend strong support to the notion that these sorts of decisions certainly contributed. Basically, they took shortcuts, wanted things done faster, cheaper. While I can’t necessarily fault them for that, given what’s on the line (lives, billions of dollars, environmental disaster), well… evidently the execs can put a (cheap) price on it all.

And so, some people claim this is a failing of the free-market and proof that we need more governmental oversight and regulation.

Folks, all the oversight in the world wouldn’t stop this, and it’s also not a failing of the free market.

It’s one simple thing that caused it.

Basic human greed.

I have no problem with making money. If I could swim like Scrooge McDuck through an ocean of money, I’d be happy to do so. But there’s something to be said for putting your personal greed above all else. They just saw the dollar signs, they didn’t care about anything else… and this is how they — and the whole world — will now pay for it.

I do believe one can be moral and ethical and still make lots of money. It’s not a matter of government control, it’s not a matter of free-market… neither caused this, neither will solve this. Greed is orthogonal to those things, and greed is the real problem. And frankly, it’s what sort of free-market we have that is really going to make BP (and all future oil companies) understand why the course of action and internal company decisions that led up to this is never a road to again go down. Let’s hope we all can learn from this and never do it again.