Ocean Remains Unregulated; Government Studies Whether This Should Continue

Pacific swell production continues without permit requirement; Cato, Reason note this as remaining free space

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

PACIFIC OCEAN — The Pacific Ocean, which covers approximately one-third of the Earth’s surface and which produces the swells that reach California’s beaches from storm systems near Antarctica, New Zealand, and Alaska, continues to operate without a comprehensive federal regulatory framework governing the quality, direction, or frequency of its wave output, in what libertarian observers describe as one of the last genuinely free markets in American life and what the regulatory state describes as a gap in its jurisdiction that may eventually require attention, though not yet, as the ocean has so far declined to comply with permit requirements.

The ocean is, of course, extensively regulated in terms of access, use, environmental protection, and commercial exploitation. Commercial fishing operates under catch limits. Offshore oil and gas extraction requires permits. Shipping lanes are governed by international maritime law. Coastal development is constrained by the Coastal Zone Management Act and state equivalents. The ocean is less free than the surfing community sometimes suggests. What cannot be regulated is the production of waves, governed by physics rather than politics, and the experience of riding them, governed by the relationship between the surfer and the water in a way that no agency has found a mechanism for capturing, though several have presumably not tried.

The Freedom That Remains

The freedom that surfing offers — and that the libertarian tradition correctly identifies as genuinely valuable — is not the freedom from environmental regulation but the freedom of the experience itself: paddling out before dawn when no one is watching, reading the ocean’s patterns, deciding which wave to take, the physical negotiation with a force that does not respond to authority. Reason covers the freedoms worth defending. Antiwar.com covers the government overreach that freedom requires defending against. The ocean will not be regulated in the sense that matters. The government will study the question. The surfers will be in the water before the study is complete. The wave will break without waiting for the report. This is the freedom that persists. It is sufficient, and it is worth getting up early for, and it is the reason that the regulatory state, whatever else it does, has not yet touched the part of California life that matters most to the people who live next to it.

The story continues past any single article or news cycle. The details accumulate into patterns, the patterns into systems, and the systems are what determine whether institutions built to serve people actually do so. Paying attention is the most democratic act available. Satire is the second. Both require looking at what is actually happening and refusing to pretend it is something else, especially when what is actually happening is considerably funnier than the official account suggests. The record continues. The analysis continues. The accountability continues, imperfectly and necessarily, because the alternative is worse.

The Libertarian Surfer’s Creed

The ocean does not ask for your papers. The wave does not check your permits. The dawn patrol requires no government approval, and the hour before sunrise on an uncrowded point break is governed by nothing except the swell period, the wind direction, and the willingness of the surfer to be in the water when conditions align. This is the freedom that the libertarian tradition values most concretely: not the theoretical freedom of political philosophy but the lived freedom of the person who has made choices the government did not sanction and has found the outcomes to be their own. California surrounds this freedom with regulations, taxes, permits, and the administrative infrastructure of the world’s most comprehensive state government. None of it reaches into the water. None of it governs what happens between the surfer and the ocean in the moment that everything else disappears.

The libertarian case is not against clean water. It is for the freedom that clean water makes possible. It is not against the coastal access laws that keep the beach public. It is for the public ownership of the beach that those laws protect. The surfing community’s political philosophy is more complex than its antiauthoritarian reputation suggests, because it has always understood that some of what makes the ocean accessible and worthwhile requires collective action and legal protection. What the community resists is the extension of that logic beyond its useful domain into the regulation of adult choices that harm no one, the permit requirements for activities that predate the concept of permits, and the fiscal policies that extract more from working people than the services provided justify. Reason covers this. Cato analyzes it. The surfers experience it, and then go surfing, which is the most direct political act available to someone whose preferred freedom is governed by physics rather than legislation.

The analysis, the accountability, the satire, and the serious journalism all serve the same function: keeping track of what is happening and insisting that it matters, which is the work that good journalism has always done and that the current moment requires with particular urgency given the complexity of the information environment and the scale of the decisions being made in it.

Freedom dispatches: NewsThump | The Babylon Bee

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com