Don’t confuse our country with D.C.

Published 8:26 pm Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Probably the strangest statement coming out of Washington lately — and certainly one of the most disturbing —came from Democrat Congressman David Scott of Georgia.

“Your hate for this president is coming before your love of this country,” he said last week. “Because if you love this country you would not be closing it down.”

It’s bad enough to impugn your opponents’ motives — Scott is presuming that no one in the GOP has any legitimate policy disagreements with President Barack Obama over health care — but it’s even worse to confuse the government with the country.

They are not the same thing.

Want proof? Look to the energy industry. It’s rocking along, even as the federal government has hit the shoals.

“America’s government may be closed, but its energy sector is open for business,” reports Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute, writing for MarketWatch. “We are overtaking Russia as the world’s largest oil and gas producer. Other countries with large reserves of natural resources have governments that are functional, yet their institutions and technology limit their production.”

She points to Russia, Saudi Arabia and China – whose governments are “open,” but whose energy sectors are depressed.

“But America is producing more oil because private sector brains trump government bureaucracy — and much of America’s oil is on private lands,” she says. “Despite delays over permits, the oil and gas industry has been able to outperform its foreign counterparts.”

In fact, government has merely slowed down the energy boom.

“According to data collected by the Institute for Energy Research, federal drilling permits have become more difficult to acquire,” Ms. Furchtgott-Roth reports. “To get a better idea of how the federal government is slowing down the process, an August study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that applications to the Bureau of Land Management for drilling permits declined by 50 percent between 2007 and 2012. Plus, the Bureau said in an internal memorandum that it has not been able to process applications within a month, as is required to do by law.”

Yet the energy sector is racing long anyway.

“In North Dakota, where production is thriving in the Bakken region, only one well has been drilled on federal property,” she notes. “The reason that North Dakota can produce so much oil and gas is that the shale formations are on private property, so permitting is far simpler. Lynn Helms, Director of North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources, predicted on September 26th that the State’s daily oil production would double by 2017 — to 1.6 million barrels. North Dakota produces 874,460 barrels of oil and over 800 million cubic feet of natural gas daily.”

We see the same thing in Texas, with a drilling boom despite a dysfunctional federal government.

“Foreigners are no doubt laughing at America’s dysfunctional government,” she concludes. “But our private energy sector is unparalleled, and is the key to future economic growth.”

Let them laugh. It’s only when we start thinking of Washington, D.C. as “our country” and not as “our government,” that we’re really in trouble.