Off shore drilling is far from a private enterprise. It is in fact a classic “public/private partnership” where deals are made to benefit both the private company and the state. The government owns natural resources–i.e. the ocean, the ocean floor, and the areas below the floor, where the oil is found. These are in fact nationalized resources. They then lease the right to use all of this to a private company who adds private capital to the mix. The private company and the state then share in the booty. As part of the deal the company also gets a legal limit on the liability that it must incur for any damages it might impose on others in the process of drilling. By the way, this is a benefit that its partner, the government, already enjoys in spades going into the relationship. With sovereign immunity making it very difficult if not impossible to sue the government at all, the limit to liability for the state–or its agents–may effectively be zero.
Offshore drilling is much closer to classic progressive economic policy of the kind promoted by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt (and I might add Benito Mussolini) than it is an approach to economics that would have been advocated by Adam Smith or Milton Friedman. Indeed, the progressive model of economics is to essentially have the entire economy resemble offshore drilling, with a few large companies colluding with the government for their mutual benefit.
