Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

NASA’s Budget

5 Comments

Congress has finally gotten around to passing an FY09 budget for agencies operating on a continuing resolution, including NASA. Jeff Foust has the numbers. I’m not sure the last time this happened, if ever, but it actually is getting more than it requested. There is no change in manned spaceflight (Shuttle plus ISS plus Exploration) but aeronautics and science are getting a bump. As Jeff notes, this doesn’t include the extra billion that the agency gets in “stimulus.”

So, for the first time in a long time, the agency is flush, and not getting its budget cut. I guess that when the old saying has gone from “a billion here and a billion there,” to “a trillion here and a trillion there,” it gets hard to argue for fiscal discipline in any area, even one that has traditionally been contentious. It’s just a shame that so much of the money is wasted, given NASA’s current plans.

Political Commentary

Government Conspiracy Theories

7 Comments

Yuval Levin explains why they’re implausible:

…no one around here, in either party and on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, has nearly the information, ability, or competence to pull off any kind of complex four-steps-ahead type maneuver, and the system works in a way that makes it pretty much impossible to seriously try. Most of the time, people are barely managing to keep their heads above water amidst the rush of events and to respond to the latest unexpected and ridiculous screwup.

I’ll always remember riding into work on the train day after day when I was a (very) junior staffer in Newt Gingrich’s Speaker’s Office in 1998 and reading in the paper about how the Republican leadership in Congress was setting traps for Bill Clinton and playing some ingenious chess game with the impeachment process, and then arriving at work and finding that no one had any idea how things had gotten where they had or what would happen next. It was much the same working in the White House: All the various conspiracy theories (good and bad) were utterly laughable. Governing is terribly complicated and the people doing it, while often very intelligent, could never hope to master anything close to the command of contingency necessary to carry off any kind of conspiracy. They often can’t even manage to meet their actual responsibilities adequately in the face of the indescribably intense entropy of government. (That’s, by the way, one more reason why they should not be given trillions of dollars to throw around).

This applies to space policy as well. And it’s particularly hard to get good policy in such an environment when it isn’t even perceived to be politically important. It also reminds me of a story that the late and deeply lamented Tom Rogers told me, from when he was working for the Johnson administration, and came to the realization that in Washington, no one is in charge, really. Some people have lofty titles, and big offices, and issue orders, and occasionally they’re followed, but mostly, as Yuval notes, it’s a highly entropic process, a sticky mess of friction and confusion. It’s the nature of a democracy, and please spare us from a strong man who will cut through it, because he’s likely to end up slicing vital things.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Next Stage Of Wrecking The Economy

8 Comments

Get ready for the cram down:

Now, maybe higher interest rates on home loans would be a good thing. Home ownership is heavily subsidized in this country, and the reason bankruptcy law currently protects banks from losses on principal is so that they can keep mortgage-interest rates low. But is Congress really going to let mortgage-interest rates rise as a result of this new law? Liberal interest groups already think credit-card interest rates are a crime against humanity. Can you imagine the hue and cry whenever mortgage-interest rates start to tick up?

The more likely scenario is that Congress passes some new law that keeps mortgage-interest rates suppressed, even though the new bankruptcy law has exposed banks to greater risk. If your goal is to re-inflate the housing bubble and create another credit catastrophe, well, there you go.

It’s truly infuriating the way politicians muck with the market, then implement more mucking to deal with the unintended consequences of the first muck, and then blame laissez-faire capitalism for the problems. And the media let them get away with it, repeatedly.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Man Who Talked Back

Jimmy Pethokoukis:

In 1937, there was a radio debate between Wendell Willkie— later to become the 1940 Republican presidential nominee—and Franklin Roosevelt administration official Robert Jackson—later a Supreme Court justice—about the proper economic role of government. (The event and its fallout are wonderfully described in the outstanding book “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes.)

By all accounts, Willkie won easily by arguing that FDR’s efforts at nationalizing the utilities industry, his dramatic tax increases, and his administration’s push for prosecutions of businessmen had frozen the private sector with fear and prevented the country from returning to prosperity. The Saturday Evening Post would later dub Willkie “The Man Who Talked Back” against the New Deal and Big Government. I would love to see a debate between Santelli and Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs.

Yeah, I’d pay to see that, but they’d have to institute a mercy rule, I think, after the first ten minutes.

I hope that Santelli is ready for his upcoming IRS audit.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Space Billiards

5 Comments

There is an excellent and comprehensive discussion of the recent satellite collision over at The Space Review today. There is plenty of blame to go around, from perverse incentives in the military, to government policies that are long on rhetoric and short on funding and priority, and corporate risk taking:

It also appears that either Iridium or the JSpOC terminated the collision screening for the Iridium constellation at some point between July 2007 and the collision in February 2009, as Iridium has made repeated public statements that they did not receive any warning. Likewise, the US military has stated that they did not have any warning. The following additional comment by Campbell at the same event may shed some light as why this happened:

That said, this isn’t aviation; the Big Sky theory works [emphasis added]. We figure that the risk of a collision on any individual conjunction is about one in 50 million. However if we have 400 a week for ten years, you can do the math; clearly that risk is something bigger than zero. As I said, our coordination with JSpOC is great.

Basing the protection of the largest low Earth orbit constellation of satellites on such a theory, even when there is a significant amount of data showing that it could be false, leads one to question the decision-making process involved. Perhaps Iridium decided that they could not afford the resources to deal with the decision-making and maneuver planning to properly operate their satellites in a safe manner. If that is indeed true—and there is no known hard evidence either way—then they placed the short-term financial well being of one company over the long-term welfare of all.

Clearly, the entire international system in place for dealing with this kind of problem (to the degree that it exists at all) needs to be overhauled.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Remembering Our First President

9 Comments

I’m on record as being opposed to “President’s Day,” which seems to be simply another excuse for a federal holiday, and it mushes all the presidents together as though they’re all equally worthy of honoring, when clearly some are better than others, even if we disagree on which are which. Back in the olden days, we used to celebrate both Lincoln’s birthday on the 12th, and Washington’s birthday on the 22nd (today). Scott Johnson has some thoughts on the birthday anniversary of the American Cincinnatus, a man who could have been king, but instead created the republican template for all presidents to follow, broken only by FDR, who ran for third and fourth terms.

Political Commentary

The American Tea Party

57 Comments

…has a Facebook page.

You know, maybe the American Tea Party is a third party that could actually get enough adherents to work…

[Update a few minutes later]

Of course, that was just an off-the-cuff comment, and it deserves a lot more thought. “Clarendon” has provided some:

I’m not objecting to the protests. Far from it in fact. I’ll be at the protest in Washington, D.C. But I am not expecting anything other than street theater, or the political equivalent of clearing our throat rather than the yelling our politicians deserve to hear. I won’t compare it to the Boston Tea Party, because there is no comparison. To claim otherwise is to both cheapen the actual protest by 200 Bostonians and their thousands of supporters, and to inflate the magnitude of our current actions.

I wonder, what are we expecting to achieve from these protests? Are we content to merely register our disapproval, or are we seeking to change what Congress and our president have done? If it is the former, I’m sure the politicians will note our objection, and wait for us to quiet down. If it is the latter, I fear our current protests are too scatter-shot to do any real good.

What is the target of our protest? Are we protesting the President and Congress for an act already passed, or are we petitioning our state and local governments to refuse to accept the stimulus money?

What do we do if these protests do not result in the change in policies we are asking for? What happens next?

Make no mistake, once a movement like this has begun, it will, sooner or later, have to answer these difficult questions or risk failure. Now is the seed-time of liberty, and the steps we take and the words we use will either be recalled triumphantly by our grandchildren, or seen as a sad charade conducted by children who could not muster the strength and conviction of their ancestors.

It’s a good question. But a strongly related one (though not one that the original tea partiers had thought through themselves) is “what does this movement stand for? What are its principles?”

It’s very easy to say that we’re opposed to the bailout(s), just as “we’re opposed to tyranny and taxation without representation, and a tax imposed on our favorite hot beverage with no recourse.” But to what else are we opposed? What are we for? Those are the issues on which third parties have foundered over the decades, even ignoring the institutional difficulties of starting one. It’s very easy to unite against something, because the enemy of my enemy is always my friend, but the devil lies in the details of determining what one stands for.

I’d like to think that this is a small-government movement, but I fear that people who are opposed to the bailout(s) aren’t really opposed to big government — they just don’t like what the big government has been doing lately.

[Late Pacific update]

Here’s more from PJ Media.

[Sunday morning update]

Has the revolt of the Kulaks begun?

[Another update later morning]

OK, I didn’t watch Schoolhouse Rock, but I think I get it anyway.

[Early afternoon update]

Per one of the commenters, yes, the Perot mania is exactly what I was thinking when I expressed the concerns above. That was a Seinfeld campaign — a campaign about nothing.