Posted on 01/16/2004 4:07:34 AM PST by from occupied ga
Imagine your neighbor throwing a party to show off his brand new high-tech boat – or flower garden or remodeled kitchen. Pick your item and imagine the triumph in your neighbor’s eyes, voice and body language. You would surely be a spoilsport to try to rain on his parade with any kind of negative or derisive comment. What a mean thing that would be! But imagine that you discovered that your neighbor had built his invention by first raiding his other neighbor’s savings account. His fabulous new gizmo no longer looks so fabulous to you and, you conclude, it is quite perverse that it looks fabulous to him. Sure, it is still something of a wonder – what a thing to create, to build. But it cannot be reasonably denied that the means by which the fellow got the thing done, namely, by robbing his other neighbor, cast a very serous cloud over whatever wonderful thing he made that way.
Well, that’s how I see all those fabulous achievements of NASA, including some of the American government’s space exploration. It is actually worse than that. Since most of those who take part in those ventures are completely oblivious to the venality of the means by which their projects get off the ground – how their funding is secured, how it deprives millions of citizens of various amounts of wealth from which they might have produced their own more or less fabulous creations – I am not only appalled at the viciousness of these celebrations but also at the rank moral ignorance of all those who go about the celebration without a clue as to its source.
It would, indeed, be more honest to witness at least some of the folks who come on television to proclaim the wonders of these achievements if they toasted the extortionist scheme that provided them with the funding. At least we would learn that these folks are aware of what they are doing, that they are vicious but not also stupid. Instead, however, they go about their celebrations blithely, as if nothing untoward had been involved in how it all came to be achieved.
I am by no means some kind of Luddite who thinks the great leaps of technology, including space explorations, demonstrate the sin of hubris on part of the human race. No, that ignorant scientists and technologists who can stand and cheer when a brilliant payload lands on Mars and sends back stunning pictures that tell us all kinds of stuff we could make use of. It isn’t even necessary in these cases to produce immediate utilitarian results – the feats in and of themselves, like those of other human adventures, are often sufficient to cause delight for most decent people.
However, when one knows that these feats are produced on the backs of millions of tax payers – folks from whom wealth is confiscated at the point of a gun, ultimately, and who might very well have had vital objectives to pursue with the aid of their wealth and were cruelly deprived of this – there is no way to take part in all the hoopla. In fact, witnessing the morally blind pride exhibited by all those scientists, engineers, and administrators is quite painful. I must deny myself the joy I know I would feel if the accomplishments had not had been fueled by blood money.
But, perhaps I am odd. When I run across the so called marvels of past civilizations in Europe and elsewhere, such as the palaces, cathedrals, pyramids, great walls, and magnificent monuments, I find it difficult not to reflect on the deliberate, utterly avoidable human devastation that it took to get many of these artifacts produced. I always ask myself how things would have gone had all those people who were conscripted to labor on all these wondrous creations had the chance to choose their own projects.
I realize, of course, that they would probably have squandered a good deal of their lives and resources but, then, I recall that their conscripted labor and resources also went to waste a good deal of the time – in the service of wars of conquest, subjugation or confiscation, or of idolatry and frivolity. And then I recall, too, that while perhaps some of these products of forced labor, just as the recent Mars landing of the unmanned space craft, were wonderful and even helpful, we will never know how it would have gone had individuals been left free to determine to what end to devote their own labors and resources.
And, of course, it is also worth keeping in mind that many of the fabulous achievements resulting from conscripted mass labor created environmental destruction, too, which the less grandiose, more modest voluntary projects of individuals and small groups of freely united humans tended to avoid. (Just think of TVA, the Interstate Highway System, the massive canal projects and damns around the globe.)
But, yes, some of these projects are wonderful. They are only made not so by the fact that their creation violated the most elementary principle of civilized human association, freedom of choice.
January 16, 2004
Tibor Machan [send him mail] holds the Freedom Communications Professorship of Free Enterprise and Business Ethics at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, CA. A Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, he is author of 20+ books, most recently, The Passion for Liberty (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
The Louisiana purchase, also. I did go over the Constitution and could find nothing in in it which explicitly authorized either purchase.
In other words you can't. If you're too dim to realize I was showing where I think the government is spending wasting money then that's your problem.
What you really ought to do blah blah blah
What you really ought to do is get over your inability to do anything except insult if you disagree and post a logical response if you're up to it. Which it appears that you're not
Since you two are so fond of the false straw man argument, how about getting back the $trillion of so that the government spent unconstitutionally on welfare over the last 40 years or so? And since you seem to hold the constitution in such low regard, then what do you think should be the criteria on which taxation and spending is based? Majority vote? Politician's whim? Do you think there should be any limits on taxation and government spending at all? If so what?
Nice try, but I don't think so. You were trying to let us know how bright and principled and politically astute you are.
Bingo!
The constitutionality of it was settled for me hundreds of years ago by the acts of the people who founded our country.
I'm sorry you hold our Founders decisions in such low regard. But many living constitutionalists do.
OK I admit it. I'm smarter, more principled and more politically astute than you are.
You've never read it have you?
Are you trying to say that you have more brains in your whole head than I've got in my little finger?
The one that means nothing to you.
But Alaska was just like the Moon: a cold far-away wasteland with apparently nothing we'd ever want.
I'm amazed we bought it since the only good reason to was a rather vague national defence one.
Good question. Section 8 Clause 7 "To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" Positive, but the interstate is paid for by federal taxes on motor fuel (or at least that is my understanding of where the funds come from) So in reality you determine how much you contribute to the interstate system by determining how much you drive. NASA, along with the HEW, HUD and other alphabet soup in Moscow Washington is direct wealth transfer, and not really a pay per use system.
Hey! This monarchy stuff's kinda cool. It's like being a salaried groupie :)
After dinner and a few drinks, the space race came up. The old friend's wife made the statement that we would never get to the Moon because it did not say we would do so in the Bible.
My wife and I were somewhat surprised but did not offer a reply as a person's religion is their own affair. There was a pregnant silence.
The old friend, an Aggie, took a swing from his Old Crow and said to not worry. "When we get there, my wife will find a passage in the Bible that lets us land."
I see a certain person among us who has still not found that passage, if you know what I mean...
No I'm just playing your little flame game, but you started out boring with nothing to say and that hasn't changed. If you have a good moral reason that justifies taking money at gunpoint that I worked for and spending it on pictures of rocks and dust just say so.
So now it's not a matter of principle but just a question of whether it's a good idea?
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