…that American health care is better than the collectivists would have you believe.
Category Archives: Business
The Legal Problems Of Space Junk
Some thoughts from space law professor Glenn Reynolds.
More Propellant Depot Thoughts
…and news, and links, from Alan Boyle. And regardless of my complaints about MSNBC (and they would be legion, if I thought it worth the bandwidth) he’s a bright, shining star there.
Cash For Clunkers
…is already broke, after less than a week. It was supposed to have enough money to last through October.
Yeah, let’s put these people in charge of health care.
The Unseen Costs
…of the minimum wage:
Several years ago, the city council of Santa Monica, Calif., decided to make the town a workers’ paradise by passing a union-backed law requiring everyone to be paid at least $12.25 an hour.
At the time, restaurant owner Jeff King complained to me that that law would “dry up the entry-level jobs for just the people they’re trying to help.”
He was right. It’s why gas stations no longer hire teenagers to wash your windshield. Wage minimums tell employers: “Don’t give a beginner a chance.”
Such losses are hard to see, but they are widespread. One company closes because it can’t afford to pay higher wages. Another decides to produce its product with fewer workers, and another never expands. Perhaps most importantly, there’s the business that never opens. The people who were never hired don’t complain—they wouldn’t know whom to blame—they don’t even know that they were harmed. They are the unseen victims.
And many of them are black, and the people that the economic ignorami, including the African-American one in the White House, falsely purport to be helping.
Not A Jobs Program?
A couple months ago, I offered some advice to the Augustine panel:
Ignore the politics
Yes, of course Senator Shelby (R-AL) is going to want to see a new vehicle developed in Huntsville, Alabama, and Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) is going to want to ensure the maintenance of jobs at the Cape, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and various Houston-area congressmen are going to want to maintain jobs at Johnson Space Center. That will take priority in their minds over actual accomplishments in space.
But your job is to tell the policymakers how to give the taxpayers the best value for their money — and how to maximize our space-faring capabilities as soon as possible, so that if we do see something coming at us or find riches off the planet, we can take advantage of it.
Think of yourself like a Base Closing and Realignment Commission that provides recommendations for the nation as a whole, not local interests. Let the politicians argue about how to preserve jobs (while ignoring all of the jobs and wealth not being created due to the opportunity costs of their parochial decisions).
I don’t know whether he read it or not, but he seems to be following it:
A presidential space panel on Thursday challenged NASA’s vision of establishing a base on the moon and instead weighed other ambitious options that include free-ranging spaceships that could visit destinations throughout the inner solar system.
Noticeably absent, however, was discussion of NASA’s work force — despite a packed hotel ballroom filled with dozens of Kennedy Space Center workers worried about pink slips.
“We’re not designing any option with the idea in mind of preserving or not preserving the work force,” said Norm Augustine, the retired Lockheed Martin CEO who leads the 10-member panel named by the White House to evaluate NASA’s human spaceflight program.
…But even testimony from Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp did little to steer the conversation in that direction. He warned that Florida faces an “economic shock wave” during the time between the shuttle’s retirement and the first launch of its problem-plagued successor, which may not be ready until 2019.
“Due to the impending gap, Florida is bracing for a hardship — the magnitude of which the state has not seen for decades,” said Kottkamp, who estimated that the 7,000 job losses at KSC could ripple into 20,000 more unemployed workers on the Space Coast.
Defense has the same political problems, of course, with the fight in Congress to keep the F-22 funded being the latest example, and one in which the arguments are explicitly made that they have to do so to preserve jobs, with whether or not it actually helps us defend the country a second-tier issue at best. It’s even harder to fight this pork mentality when it comes to something as unimportant as space exploration and development, so we’ll see how long Augustine’s attitude remains once the politicians get involved. But I’m glad that we will at least make clear the difference between a program designed to explore and develop space, and one designed to make work for the politically connected.
So Let’s Vote For It, Anyway
Congress doesn’t understand the health-care legislation. But it’s important to pass it as quickly as possible.
This is beyond Lewis Carroll.
FUD
Commercial space advocates have often complained that NASA tends to put a stick in the spokes of attempts to raise money and get ventures off the ground. Critics claim that this is a fantasy, and that NASA is both uninterested in, and incapable of doing such a thing. Jeff Foust points out the latest example of the “fantasy”:
[Here’s] a passage in a Wall Street Journal article this week (subscription required) about Virgin Galactic’s deal to sell a stake to an Abu Dhabi fund:
However, a NASA official cautioned that venturing into space is extremely costly, dangerous and difficult.
“Everyone has the opinion ‘we can do this’ but I’ve seen so many fail,” he said, adding that running a shuttle costs at least $3 billion a year.
All this is true: spaceflight is difficult and not cheap, and many ventures who have tried it before have failed. But what does the operating cost of the shuttle have to do with a suborbital space tourism system?
Absolutely nothing, of course. But it helps sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of an investor who might not know any better. And of course, the clueless reporter doesn’t challenge the comment, but simply stenographs it as though it’s not a complete non sequitur. Because he or she got the valuable opinion of an unnamed NASA official, which is all that matters.
News From The Augustine Panel
I have it on fairly good authority that one of the subpanels will have an interesting announcement this morning, that some readers may find encouraging. Don’t know much more than that, and I’ll be incommunicado until this afternoon, when we get back to Boca.
[Mid-afternoon update]
I see from comments that there was a strong endorsement of propellant depots for exploration beyond LEO (which, as Jeff noted, should have been so obvious that historians will look back dumbfounded in retrospect that we remained hung up on megalaunchers for so long). I haven’t seen the presentation yet, but Clark Lindsey has a summary.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jon Goff: “The most amazing twenty-five minutes in NASA history.”
Well, that’s probably a slight exaggeration — I think an event that happened a little over forty years ago probably tops it, but I know what he means. The question is whether or not the policy establishment will pay attention. I have an email from someone in the know who notes that everyone on that subpanel gets the Frontier Enabling Test.
I’m sorry I missed the presentation live, but I assume that it will be replayable, or Youtubed. It certainly should be — I think that it probably will prove to be quite historic.
[Update about 4 PM EDT]
What is Norm Augustine thinking about ISS?
If he was not playing devil’s advocate, then Augustine’s first question indicates a belief that the American public might not be so excited about funding a lengthy and costly mission to Mars that isn’t clearly an American mission. His second question suggests he believes that when you get right down to it, there isn’t much to the space station beyond the great international coalition it has wrought.
There are many strong arguments to keep the space station — most notably that it seems ridiculous to abandon it just five years after it’s completed — but if Augustine believes deep down that it serves no real scientific or exploration purpose, that will carry a lot of weight with Obama.
I think that for current planned uses, and in its current location, it’s not worth the money of keeping it going. If “international cooperation” is so important to Sally Ride and the other politically correct astronauts, let them scrounge up the couple billion a year to do so from ESA, Japan, and others. But I’d like to see some serious proposals to move it to a more affordable location at 28 degrees (it wouldn’t take long to save the money that it would take to move it in reduced launch costs) and use it as a base facility for depot operations and research, as well as a primary base for extended-duration crew research for deep-space missions, perhaps using coorbiting Bigelow modules. With a short-distance cargo-crew tug, this would eliminate the need for a back-to-earth lifeboat, for everything short of a coronal mass ejection or alien attack.
[Evening update]
Jon Goff has posted his white paper on propellant depots, which I would assume played at least some role in today’s results.
Obamacare
It’s even worse than you think:
The Democrats want to spend $1.5 trillion over a decade, impose an $800 billion tax increase in the midst of the worst recession in a generation, increase federal borrowing by $239 billion (on top of the $11 trillion the Obama budget already requires us to borrow through 2019), impose costly mandates on employers that will discourage hiring as unemployment nears 10 percent, force individuals to buy one-size-fits-all government defined insurance, and insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients. All of that would occur whether or not the plan includes a “public option,” which at this point it does include and which will exacerbate all of these problems.
As these facts have become clear, Obama’s standing has fallen and public opinion has grown decidedly less enthusiastic for the administration’s approach. The trend is likely to continue, because the details of the plan reveal that its two most serious drawbacks–its cost and the prospect of government rationing–are worse than even most of their critics have grasped.
Of course, that won’t stop them, in and of itself. We have to make our views known to our representatives next month when they’re back in their districts.
Though perhaps it’s not fair to call it Obamacare, since the president admits that he doesn’t even know what’s in the bill. And yet he continues to flail around attempting (and apparently failing) to defend it.
[Update late afternoon]
Why “health care” is not a right:
…imagine if the government had a body of experts charged with figuring out what your free-speech rights are, or your right to assemble, or worship. Mr. Jones, you can say X and Y, but not Z. Ms. Smith, you can freely assemble with Aleutians, Freemasons, and carpenters, but you may not meet in public with anyone from Cleveland or of Albanian descent. Mrs. Wilson, you may pray to Vishnu and Crom, but never to Allah or Buddha, and when you do pray, you cannot do so for longer than 20 minutes at a time, unless it is one of several designated holidays. Please see Extended Prayer Form 10–22B.
Of course, all of this would be ludicrous beyond words.
Actually, I can imagine this gang coming up with something exactly like that.