Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Entrepreneurs Go On Strike

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Thoughts at The American Thinker:

For many decades, the American dream has been undergirded by the faith that regardless of its current state, the economy would come back around thanks to the greatness of ordinary people being free to do extraordinary things. Thus the bold gunslinger mentality many business owners have had in previous recessions, refusing to participate, and even expanding cheaply to grab market share in the next recovery.

But it’s different now, and there is no denying it. The dream itself is being killed by legal and regulatory micromanagement. Washington is determined to employ policies to cure something that can be cured only by government getting the hell out of the way.

A small business summit in the White House will accomplish nothing unless the invitees include unions and lawyers and bureaucrats, in which case it will be devastating. When did a union or a lawyer or a bureaucrat ever start a business? How many times a day do they kill one?

And that’s the climate entrepreneurs see. Unions, lawyers, and bureaucrats gain more power and leverage every day. The big opportunity now is to spend government money: an eighteen-million-dollar government contract to create an awful Recovery.org website, SEIU union jobs in ObamaCare, bankruptcy lawyers, and perhaps carbon credit trades coming. There are ACORN-style crony contracts to be had, not to mention all the jobs created by the David Axelrod astroturfing media escapades. If you are connected or if your dream is to enrich yourself by killing the dreams of others, then the field is ripe for you.

Ayn Rand saw this coming.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Quoteworthy

26 Comments

On mandates:

In the primaries, Obama distinguished himself from Clinton on health care by opposing an individual mandate. In the general election, he distinguished himself from McCain by opposing taxes on health benefits. So now he is trying to pass bills with both an individual mandate and taxes on health benefits—and his supporters are saying that Congress should go along because he won the election.

“I won” is not a substitute for substantive policy discussion.

Business, Economics, Space

The Suborbital Refueling Dance

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Jon Goff has an interesting variation on a concept that’s been around for a long time, but never implemented: refueling a suborbital vehicle in space to allow it to get to orbit. It’s in between Black Horse, which did an aerial fueling (or rather, oxidizing, since the propellant transferred was the oxidizer rather than the fuel), and standard orbital refueling. There’s an up side and a down side to it, relative to aerial refueling.

The down side is that unless the suborbital trajectory is fairly high, at least in velocity, you don’t have a lot of time for the operations before entering the atmosphere. You’d only have a few minutes, but that might be enough to transfer several thousand pounds of propellants. You’d have a trade as to whether to transfer just fuel, or just oxidizer or both. The latter would increase the likelihood of failure, since you’d have to mate two transfer booms, and simultaneously transfer two fluids.

The up side is that, out of the atmosphere, it’s easier and safer to fly in formation, because there are no wind gusts to worry about, and the physics is much more predictable (gravity doesn’t tend to vary much over non-astronomical times).

In a sane world, NASA would have long ago built an X-vehicle to prove out the concept, but that’s not the world in which we live. What I’d like to see is a prize for the first demonstration of such a propellant transfer operation, which all of the suborbital folks – Scaled (or VG), XCOR, Masten or Armadillo or others — could go after. You could have tiers of total propellant transferred, or total propellant transferred in a given time.

The other appealing thing about it is that, as Jon notes, it has benign abort characteristics. Which brings to mind another prize that NASA could offer (again, in a sane world). If reliability is really valued (the focus on heavy lift in general, and Ares in particular, would indicate that it’s not particularly, despite the advertisements), like low cost, it will only be achieved through high flight rates, and no one will really believe it until it’s been demonstrated. Fortunately, reusable suborbital vehicles are capable of lots of flights for low marginal cost per flight. So all they need is funding to do lots of flights. I would propose a prize for a consecutive number of successful deliveries to orbit (you could even start off with suborbital missions). Or, rather, consecutive number of non-failures, where failure is defined as losing the payload. In other words, you wouldn’t be penalized for an intact abort. The prize would be won when the requisite number of missions were flown with no losses. Abort rate could be a tie breaker for multiple winners.

If you wanted to have a demonstrated reliability (defined as non-payload loss, not mission success) of 0.999, you’d have to fly a thousand flights. If the marginal cost of a suborbital flight is, say, $10K, this would cost ten million, about the same as the X-Prize. So offer a fifty-million dollar prize, and see who goes for it. Once that’s won, offer half a billion for orbital.

Business, Media Criticism, Space

The Latest Smear On Space Tourism

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Clark Lindsey responds.

[Update a while later]

You know, when supposed captains of the European space industry are both able and willing to submit such an ignorant and illogical piece to a major industry publication, and it’s willing to run it, it tells us something about how screwed up that industry is, and explains why we’ve made so little progress in opening up space after over half a century.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

George W. Hoover

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Ilya Somin says that George Bush should, finally, stop giving a bad name to free markets:

Bush’s belated support for free markets follows in Hoover’s footsteps. After leaving office in 1933, Hoover wrote books and articles defending free markets and criticizing the Democrats’ New Deal. Some of his criticisms of FDR were well-taken. Many New Deal policies actually worsened and prolonged the Great Depression by organizing cartels and increasing unemployment. But by coming out as a free market advocate, the post-presidential Hoover actually bolstered the cause of interventionism because he helped cement the incorrect impression that he had pursued free market policies while in office, thereby causing the Depression. Bush’s post-presidential conversion creates a similar risk: it could solidify the already widespread impression that he, like the Hoover of myth, pursued laissez-faire policies which then caused an economic crisis.

What should Bush now do if he genuinely wants to help the free market cause? The best thing would be to take up economist David Henderson’s half-joking suggestion that he “express his regret at nationalizing airport safety, carrying out illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, raiding medical marijuana clinics, bailing out General Motors, AIG and other companies, and socializing prescription drugs for the elderly [the biggest new government program from the 1960s until the present financial crisis].” Bush could also point out that he advocated an ideology of “compassionate conservatism” that included vastly expanded government, and an “ownership society” that (in his own words) involved “us[ing] the mighty muscle of the federal government” to incentivize dubious mortgages of the kind that helped cause the financial collapse of 2008. The greatest contribution Bush can now make to free market policies is to dispel the impression that he pursued them while in office.

Unfortunately, as Somin points out, the likelihood that he will admit his perfidy to markets, or the disastrous nature of many of his domestic policies, is pretty low, so the best thing he can do for free markets now is to just shut up.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Setting It Up

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…and knocking down a straw man, over at The Space Review, by Dr. Day:

Occasionally, space activists critical of NASA claim that whereas the civilian space agency is a badly-run bureaucracy that ought to be eliminated and replaced with something else, the military manages to do a much better job with its space program. The military, which they believe to be immune to congressional micromanagement and political interference, somehow manages to do great things in space.

Which “space activists critical of NASA”? With whom is he arguing? Can he name names? I wouldn’t claim that this argument has never been made, or that there aren’t people who hold such a view, but I’m not aware of any. It certainly isn’t representative of “space activists” in general. So I’m not sure what his point is. He then goes on to kick the straw out of the thing with a list of past and current DoD space (and other) procurement screwups, with which anyone who has been following things is quite familiar. And his conclusion?

By now you might have detected a common theme here: procurement of complex hardware is hard. Many projects are over-budget and behind schedule, not just at NASA, but everywhere.

Actually, that’s not the common theme that I detect. The common theme that I detect is that the government procurement system for space is seriously FUBAR, whether civil or military. One of the places that such cost and schedule problems aren’t the case (at least not to the huge degree that the government programs are) is SpaceX. Yes, things have taken longer than they hoped, and probably cost more, though we have less insight into that, because we don’t know what the original estimates were, but here’s the bottom line: they have mostly developed both a launch system and a pressurized return module, capable of carrying crew with the addition of life support and launch escape, for about a hundredth of the cost that NASA estimates it will take to develop Ares I alone. And what is the “uncommon” theme here? SpaceX is doing it with their own money, and not subject to government procurement rules and the dictates of porkmeisters on the Hill.

[Early afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has further thoughts:

SBIRS and many such projects at least have the virtue of advancing the state of the art. ARES I retreats from the state of the art. Rather than building on lessons learned from the Shuttle and taking a step forward towards practical, low cost reusable space transport, Griffin backtracked the agency and led it down the Ares I dead end where no development path to lower cost space access exists. Furthermore, it was known from the start that Ares would be hugely expensive both to develop and to operate. It is just an added insult to the taxpayer that, on top of all that, Ares turned out to have several serious technical problems that resulted in delays and even more costs. Hanging around with a rough crowd offers no excuse for this miserable project.

Indeed.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Health Care

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Mafia style:

Where would meals be better and cheaper? A city where customers could choose between restaurants competing in a free market? Or a city where everyone was forced to buy all their meals at a few mafia-controlled restaurants?

Like the mafia, Congress wants to make you an offer you can’t refuse. At least the mafia doesn’t pretend that it’s acting for your own good.

Hey, it’s the Chicago Way.