Wayne Crews, one of my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has some thoughts at Forbes about how best to regulate the new private spaceflight industry.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of my CEI colleagues, Iain Murray has a new book out, titled Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You
I ask them over at Popular Mechanics.
Not enough. And as he notes, the Democrats are completely hopeless.
At last, a presidential candidate who understand economics and the limits of government power:
“Don’t get me wrong,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are proud of this distinction. We had a 11.6 percent job growth that occurred during our two terms in office. But the headlines that accompanied that report – referring to governors, including me, as ‘job creators’ – were just wrong.”
“The fact is, I can unequivocally say that I did not create a single job while I was governor,” Johnson added. Instead, “we kept government in check, the budget balanced, and the path to growth clear of unnecessary regulatory obstacles.”
And the current gang in DC is doing exactly the opposite, so there’s no reason that continuing bad economic news should be “unexpected.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
The one stimulus that the government refuses to try:
It’s almost as if Washington envisions the economy not as a complex network of billions of voluntary, mutually beneficial relationships, but as a lawn mower which could be forced to run smoothly if only they’d yank hard enough on the starter cord.
Amid government’s rush to “do something,” we forget that, on a percentage basis, the nation’s most productive years, those in which the U.S. overtook Great Britain to become the world’s leading economic power, occurred prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. What many lawmakers and regulators are not considering here is the strong possibility that the stimulus and intervention have had a deleterious effect.
No, that couldn’t possibly be.
Are we about to see a revolution in photography? If it works, I would expect prices to plummet eventually.
An op-ed from Bill Nelson and Kay Bailey Hutchison:
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 gave us the blueprint — a way to move forward with human spaceflight and to continue exploring the next frontier.
It extended the life of the International Space Station from 2015 to 2020 and eased NASA resources away from the end of the shuttle program and toward commercial spaceflight and NASA-led development of a heavy-lift rocket for deep-space exploration.
The blueprint we ushered through the Congress last fall also will help reduce the economic impact of the shuttle’s retirement. We made every effort to boost the aerospace industry and take advantage of an extremely skilled NASA work force. We also were able to avoid huge cuts at a time when Congress is slashing across the board.
While NASA and America’s space program are in a time of transition, one thing that most people can agree on is the need to press forward with human space exploration. Our country’s commitment to exploring space is a key in keeping the United States at the forefront globally of science and technology. Space exploration and a deeper understanding of how we can best utilize the great unknown is also vital to our national-security interests.
Translation: we don’t really know what “exploration” means, or how to do it, but we managed to keep the bacon flowing to our own states and those of our buddies. We’re also going to continue to claim that building a giant rocket for which there are no funded payloads is critical to national security, even though we have no idea in what way this might be true. And we’ll take credit for commercial spaceflight, even though we’ve been bad mouthing it for a year and a half, because we merely underfunded it, whereas the House wanted to zero it out altogether.
I hope and think that Nelson will lose his election next year, and Hutchison isn’t running again. I won’t miss either of them.
[Update a few minuts later]
Here’s a summary of a panel discussion in Orlando last week, on which Nelson sat. I have to say that he does sound like he’s come around on commercial space. But he’s still likely to lose, for reasons having nothing to do with space policy. I also think that Dale Ketcham overestimates the importance of space policy to the Florida electorate. They’ll be much more concerned about ObamaCare, Medicare and other issues.
Doctors and medical students are abandoning the American Medical Association.
Now, if we could just get lawyers to do the same with the ABA.
A brutal assessment by the CBO of the president’s (lack of) budget plan.
“…is based on three pillars: loopholes, fudges and lies.”
[Via Andrew Stuttaford]
A compilation of headlines. What’s amazing to me is that none of them were in any way unexpected to me, because I’ve recognized the high level of economic nincompoopery at the highest levels of government for years. It’s a shame our intellectual betters (just ask them) in the media can’t figure it out.
[Update a while later]
Gee, I guess I’m smarter than the head of the Fed, too:
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told reporters Wednesday that the central bank had been caught off guard by recent signs of deterioration in the economy. And he said the troubles could continue into next year.
“We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting,” Bernanke said. He said the weak housing market and problems in the banking system might be “more persistent than we thought.”
You don’t say.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hard to argue with this:
As an economist, if I were working for a foreign government and were to design a package of policies to destroy a country’s economy, I would design a plan very similar to what we’ve undertaken in the U.S. over the past 18 months.
If we pursue another economic stimulus of similar size to the previous one, we may as well condemn the economy to another 10-20 years of recession.
Not only will it not work, but it will significantly add to an already grave debt problem. Stimulus is what keeps entrepreneurs from creating new jobs and products. It makes them nervous, because we have to raise taxes in the future to pay for stimulus spending, and this makes for a very uncertain business environment.
You could make a similar statement about space policy. As the preface to the book I’ve been working on for a while begins: “Imagine that extraterrestrial aliens had secretly contacted the White House and U.S. Congress after the Apollo landings, and told them under dire threat that humans were to never again venture beyond low earth orbit, but that the public was not to know this, and to make sure that their successors were aware as well. If it were the case, how would space policy have been much different for the past four decades?”
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from VDH:
Two thoughts: One, the latest Democratic idea of borrowing even more money is de facto proof that all the bailouts, borrowing, vast increases in unemployment and food-stamp monies, Obamacare, etc., have done nothing but terrify employers, who are holding off buying and hiring. And, second, when one adds in the National Labor Relations Board roguery, the presidential quips about the wealthy, the Chrysler creditor mess, the nonstop spread-the-wealth, already-made-enough-money demonization of those who make over $200,000, etc., we are witnessing a sort of psychological stasis in which millions of employers are shrugging and collectively sighing, “I think I’ll pass until this crazy outfit is out of here.”
It can’t happen soon enough.