Category Archives: Political Commentary

A Space Council?

Jeff Foust has some interesting testimony from the president’s science adviser:

We have been looking at what the best way to resurrect the National Space Council in the White House would be. I think that’s going to happen. There’s no question that the gap in our capacity to put people in space is a matter of great concern with the shuttle program coming to an end and its successor program not yet ready.

That seems like good news. I wonder who will head it. Let’s hope that Joe Biden’s involvement is minimal.

He also lays out rationale for space:

Space is crucial to our national defense; it’s crucial to civil as well as military communications and geopositioning; it’s crucial to weather forecasting and storm monitoring; crucial to observation and scientific study of the condition of our home planet’s land, vegetation, oceans, and atmosphere; and it’s crucial to scientific study and exploration looking outward.

That’s all right, as far as it goes, but no mention of planetary defense or off-planet economic development or resources. There is nothing in there that would support an effort to open up space for the masses, or imply more support for private efforts. Too bad that there was no follow-up questioning in that regard.

What Ended The Depression

Megan McArdle says (correctly) that no one knows, and anyone who tells you that they do is lying or fooling themselves, but that what you were taught in school is almost certainly wrong. She also notes (again correctly) that there was a lot more to the New Deal than simply government spending (which likely didn’t have much stimulative effect), some of it good, much of it disastrous (particularly the artificial propping up of wages and prices by fiat).

One can’t run controlled experiments in economics, so we can never know for sure, but I’m inclined to at least go with economic theories that make sense and for which there is useful empirical evidence. Someone has to tell me what Hayek and von Mises got wrong to persuade me that Keynes is right. And most people who think that Keynes is right haven’t even read them.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Mr. Obama, give back my wallet.”

[Update a while later]

OK, so I’m not as impressed with David Brooks as the intelligentsia want me to be, but he does have some good thoughts occasionally:

The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.

The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.

What the world needs now is not love sweet love, but epistemological modesty. Particularly inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, the perverse nature of humanity is that often the less one knows about something, the more certain one is in his knowledge. They have never learned from the ancient Greeks that to admit the limits of your knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.

[Via Manzi, who reads David Brooks so I don’t have to]

[Late morning update]

Are we going to emulate Japan’s lost decade? It seems to be what they want to do, unfortunately.

[Bumped]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Renters are angry. They should be. They’ll probably join the tea party, too.

And here’s a novel concept: let housing prices find their clearing price. Can’t do that — it makes too much sense.

Shameless

Here’s a good round up of the corruption and collusion between Congress and the financial industry:

While Americans were asked to foot the bill—for generations—to bail out Wall Street executives from their sub-prime, mortgage-mad, derivatives driven, un-regulated market—politicians from all parties lined up to feed at the trough—knowing full well that it was these same companies’ bad business practices that placed our financial system at systemic risk.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is being paid by taxpayers to oversee these institutions, should return the money on principle or resign from the committee.

Don’t hold your breath.

You Don’t Say…

What would we do without psychologists?

“This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses,” she told CNN.

Just the first? Obviously, this needs much more research. I hope that adequate billions from Porculus will fund this vital area of study. After all, we never before had any idea whatsoever that men might be attracted to semi-naked women.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn has further thoughts.

Forget Liberaltarianism

What is the common ground between libertarians and conservatives? Looks like a reasonable list to me.

[Update a while later]

OK, we can’t get away from it. Jonah Goldberg on the perverse irony of liberaltaranism:

It is a sign of how profoundly statist a moment we are in that there’s this tempestuous debate — in a teapot to be sure — over whether libertarians, historically the purest of the sane anti-statists, should leave the nominally anti-statist party (the Right) in order to join the proudly statist party (the Left), when just about everyone agrees the net result of such a defection would be to make the anti-statist party significantly more statist. The only debate is whethere libertarians would make the statist party even marginally less statist or whether they would be rolled. And so far, the shaky consensus seems to be that the libertarians would get little to nothing for their defection while the country would (by libertarian standards) lose a great deal.

Of course, I’ve been opposed to this for years.