Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

The Homesteading Press Release

100 Comments

It’s out now, from CEI:

Proposed Law Would Encourage Off-Planet Development and Settlement

Washington, D.C., April 2, 2012 – 150 years ago in 1862, amidst the bloodiest war in our nation’s history, the Lincoln administration had the foresight to pass two historic pieces of legislation: the Pacific Railway Act and the Homestead Act. The first opened up the American West for potential settlers by encouraging railroads to build from coast to coast. The second offered title to 160 acres of land to anyone who was willing to homestead and farm it for five years. Together, after the war, these acts resulted in an explosion of economic growth of the young nation, and the opening of vast new resources for America and the world.

But half a century after the first human went into space, that new frontier remains barren, despite the wealth of potential resources available. Current international policy actively discourages the settlement of space.

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a new study by Adjunct Scholar Rand Simberg: Homesteading the Final Frontier: A Practical Proposal for Securing Property Rights in Space. Simberg argues that the U.S. should recognize transferable off-planet land claims under conditions such as those outlined by the proposed Space Settlement Prize Act, which Simberg renames the Space Homesteading Act.

A legal private property regime for real estate on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids could usher in a new era of space exploration at little or no cost to the U.S. government. As the study explains, space is rich in valuable resources. But without off-planet property rights, investors have little incentive to fund space transportation or development. Simberg proposes that the U.S. begin to recognize off-planet land claims of claimants who

A) establish human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or other bodies in the solar system;

B) provide affordable commercial transportation between the settlement and Earth; and

C) offer land for sale.

These claim rights would transform human perception of space. Currently, the international community treats outer space as an off-limits scientific preserve instead of what it could be: a frontier of possibilities for exploration, resource development, and human settlement.

Many legal scholars claim that both the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) and the 1979 Moon Treaty outlaw private property claims in space. Simberg argues that the Outer Space Treaty only precludes land claims by sovereign nations—not by individuals or corporations. He also argues that the U.S. should repudiate the Moon Treaty (to which it is not a signatory), which does explicitly outlaw such claims.

Advocates of the expansion of property rights off-planet have commended Simberg for releasing a study that draws attention to the issue and provokes much-needed debate.

“Property rights are at the core of personal freedoms,” said Gary C. Hudson, President of the Space Studies Institute. “There’s no reason to believe that they are any less important off the Earth than they are here on Earth.”

Robert Poole, Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation, said, “Ten or fifteen years ago, private-enterprise space travel was still the stuff of science fiction, so property rights in space was a non-issue. That is no longer the case, and we’d better start getting serious about such property rights if we’re serious about opening the space frontier.”

Terry C. Savage, member of the Board of Directors of the National Space Society, said, “With his proposal to solve the critical problem of establishing property rights in space, Rand Simberg has produced an extensively researched…and entirely readable…explanation of the history and underlying issues involved, followed by a simple, elegant solution. Anyone who understands the importance of humanity leaving the Earth should read and support this proposal, as I do.”

Mr. Simberg will present his study at a Capitol Hill briefing on Thursday, April 5th at 11 a.m. at the Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2325. See here for more information on the briefing and to RSVP.

► Read the full study, Homesteading the Final Frontier: A Practical Proposal for Securing Property Rights in Space.

To interview Rand Simberg, contact Christine Hall at chall@cei.org or 202-331-2258.

CEI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest group that studies the intersection of regulation, risk, and markets. For more about CEI, visit www.cei.org/about-cei.

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

“Unilateral Intellectual Disarmament”

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Why the Left is losing the argument:

In sum, the left systematically has dumbed its side down, to the point where supposedly well-educated elites are untrained and unaware of our country’s history and constitutional traditions. The left thinks words have no fixed meaning (health care and health insurance, are close enough, so they insist we can define the latter to be the former.) The liberal elites have a poor grounding in market economics so they swallow the idea that health-care insurance is “unique” because others’ purchases affect your cost of goods. (Surprise: all markets operate this way.) They advance illogical and counterfactual arguments (e.g., withdrawing a 100 percent subsidy for health care to seniors is a “mandate”) because they are unused to vigorous debate that upsets their preferences dressed up in a thin veil of factual distortion. (Sorry, taking away a freebie is not remotely the same in logic or in law as requiring you purchase something.)

Conservatives, well aware of the intellectual deterioration of liberal institutions, have spent decades pursing supplemental education in think tanks, the speeches and writings of public intellectuals (e.g., Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson), professional organizations (e.g., the Federalist society) and classrooms of intellectually rigorous scholars (e.g., Robert P. George, Harvey Mansfield and Richard Epstein). In doing so, they sharpened their rhetorical kills, versed themselves in history and political philosophy, and prepared themselves for intellectual combat against those who had rejected the idea of objective meaning, be it in literature or the Constitution. In moments like the Supreme Court argument we see how vast is the gulf between conservative and liberal elites.

Just another example of Haidt’s thesis.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Science And Society

Another Reason To Eat Chiles

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They reduce blood pressure and cholesterol. This kind of thing always makes me question such studies, though:

Chen and his colleagues turned to hamsters for the study, animals that serve as stand-ins for humans in research that cannot be done in people. They gave the hamsters high-cholesterol diets, divided them into groups, and supplemented each group’s food with either no capsaicinoids (the control group) or various amounts of capsaicinoids. The scientists then analyzed the effects.

In addition to reducing total cholesterol levels in the blood, capsaicinoids reduced levels of the so-called “bad” cholesterol (which deposits into blood vessels), but did not affect levels of so-called “good” cholesterol. The team found indications that capsaicinoids may reduce the size of deposits that already have formed in blood vessels, narrowing arteries in ways that can lead to heart attacks or strokes.

Capsaicinoids also blocked the activity of a gene that produces cyclooxygenase-2, a substance that makes the muscles around blood vessels constrict. By blocking it, muscles can relax and widen, allowing more blood to flow.

Emphasis mine. The assumption is that one gets high cholesterol from dietary cholesterol, when in fact there’s little evidence to substantiate that. But in this case, I don’t think it invalidates the research, fortunately.

Speaking of nutrition myths, here’s one that says bacon is good for you, but still gets it wrong:

Nutritionist Zoe Harcombe says: ‘Typically, about 45 per cent of the fat in pork is unsaturated. Most of that is oleic acid, the same healthy fat found in olive oil, which is known to help lower cholesterol levels.

‘Of course, the rest is unhealthy saturated fat, so moderation is key.’

Repeat after me: there is nothing wrong with saturated fat. In fact, it is much healthier than seed oils with their high omega 6s, which is where we got too much of our dietary fat. The key is to cut back on the high-glycemic carbs.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

George Orwell Would Be Amused

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The New York Times is very afraid of a court that cares about the Constitution:

If the conservatives decide that they can sidestep the Constitution to negate Congress’s choices on crucial national policies, the court’s legitimacy — and the millions of Americans who don’t have insurance — will pay a very heavy price. Chief Justice Roberts has the opportunity to avoid this disastrous outcome by forging even a narrow ruling to uphold the mandate and the rest of the law. A split court striking down the act will be declaring itself virtually unfettered by the law.

The conservatives want to “sidestep the Constitution”? Really? And if they rule (correctly) that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are not trumped by a Commerce Clause of unlimited scope, and that the powers of the federal government remain enumerated, they are “declaring themselves unfettered by the law”?

Can I acquaint the Gray Lady’s editorial board with a minor decision from a couple centuries ago called Marbury v. Madison?

[Update a while later]

The Left’s meltdown over the Constitution:

Judicial activism is not something that happens every time the Supreme Court overturns a statute. The Justices owe deference to Congress and the executive, but only to the extent that the political branches stay within the boundaries of the Constitution. Improper activism is when the Court itself strays beyond the founding document to find new rights or enhance its own authority without proper constitutional grounding.

The classic example, acknowledged by good liberals like Alexander Bickel and Archibald Cox at the time, is Roe v. Wade in 1973. The High Court discovered a right to abortion rooted in a right to privacy that it had invented in Griswold in 1965 from the Constitution’s “penumbras” and “emanations.” Roe overturned 50 state laws and pre-empted a healthy debate that would have reached a different abortion consensus in different states. Our cultural politics has been polarized ever since.

The ObamaCare case is very different, as the oral arguments made clear. The Court is debating the reach of the Commerce Clause and of its own precedents in considering the limited and enumerated federal powers that are explicit in Article I, Section 8.

The Court has often overturned laws that exceeded those powers, including laws that it said exceeded the authority of the Commerce Clause (Lopez in 1995, for example, and Morrison in 2000). Hundreds of other precedents have extolled the value of the constitution’s “dual sovereignty” system—the division of state and federal power. As recently as the U.S. v. Bond case last year, Justice Kennedy wrote that “federalism protects the liberty of the individual from arbitrary power.”

But if they rule in favor of the Constitution, they’ll be demonized nonetheless.

[Update a while later]

So, a majority of the public wants it overturned, and expects it to be overturned. And somehow the court will “lose its legitimacy” by following the Constitution, and overturning it? When it won’t even affect stare decisis?

Dream on, Left.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!