Sorry, but politics intruded as soon as Dr. Griffin decided to build Shuttle-derived hardware as the launch vehicles, in order to assuage the politicians in Alabama, Utah and Florida who were worried about the loss of Shuttle jobs. Politics intruded with the decision to complete the useless (or at least, very poor value for the money) ISS, to maintain the international commitments.
It’s completely unrealistic to expect a massive taxpayer-funded space bureaucracy to be unencumbered by politics.
Economist Vernon Smith, 2002 Nobel Laureate (and my thesis advisor) said in “Trust the Consumer!” in today’s WSJ:
Health-care costs doubled over the decade ending in 2004, in fact reaching an all-time high measured as the share — 16% — of GDP; and they continue to greatly outpace inflation. Similarly, education costs from primary levels up through college continue to grow faster than other categories of national spending. Why?
Here is a bare-bones way to think about this situation: A is the customer, B is the service provider. B informs A what A should buy from B, and a third entity, C, pays for it from a common pool of funds. Stated this way, the problem has no known economic solution because there is no equilibrium. There is no automatic balance between willingness to pay by the consumer and willingness to accept by the producer that constrains and limits the choices of each.
I am not sure that an education subsidy is a bad idea. The nation’s take from higher tax revenues from graduates may well cover the cost at the margin. Graduates earn $25k/yr more than non-graduates mid career. If we can get the health industry to extend work life, a subsidy might be justified there too. But paying 60% of what the service costs instead of a 20% co-pay or a politically-set tuition would surely create a higher quality, lower cost product.
In the Middle East, France and America are working intimately on Lebanon. They are pointing a collective finger at Syria and forcing U.N. resolutions demanding that it stop trying to control its neighbor. Chirac was a close friend of the murdered Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who kept a good chunk of his $6 billion fortune in France. Furious Hizbullah leaders in Beirut, supported by Damascus, denounce the French president as a poodle of Washington. Even more significant is the new joint front on Iran. Chirac has led Europe’s condemnations of Tehran’s threats against Israel and has been instrumental in referring its nuclear challenge to the Security Council.
Little of this is reflected in the French press, which cleaves to its diet of America-bashing pur et dur. But Chirac understands that posturing over Iraq has not protected France from Islamofascism. Militant Islamist preachers are active among the nation’s 5 million Muslim citizens, many of whom willingly believe that all their problems will get better if they follow Sharia and reject French secularism. Chirac also reacted swiftly when a French Jew was recently tortured to death after being kidnapped by a thuggish gang who believed that, because he was Jewish, his family by definition was rich enough to pay a massive ransom. This vestige of the very worst anti-Semitism shocked France and may serve to wake up intellectuals blinded to the excesses of radical Islamists by their own anti-Americanism.
As far as the Western feminists are concerned, they seem to be hovering in other dimensions, in absolute arrogance, learned from ethnologues like Claude L
It took us centuries of battles between dissenters and established religion, and the stages with which it was symbiotically entwined, to win the rights that the short-memoried invertebrate liberals now cravenly surrender!
The secular and social rights we have, the freedom from power-inflated superstitions armed to the teeth with the coercive power of a state, the right to think for ourselves and express our thoughts
It took us centuries of battles between dissenters and established religion, and the stages with which it was symbiotically entwined, to win the rights that the short-memoried invertebrate liberals now cravenly surrender!
The secular and social rights we have, the freedom from power-inflated superstitions armed to the teeth with the coercive power of a state, the right to think for ourselves and express our thoughts
It took us centuries of battles between dissenters and established religion, and the stages with which it was symbiotically entwined, to win the rights that the short-memoried invertebrate liberals now cravenly surrender!
The secular and social rights we have, the freedom from power-inflated superstitions armed to the teeth with the coercive power of a state, the right to think for ourselves and express our thoughts