David Boaz

In the premier issue of BBC Knowledge, the Cambridge University astrophysicist Martin Rees makes several provocative arguments about manned space flight. They are:

• The completion of the International Space Station (ISS) comes with a price tag of $50 billion, with the only profit being the cooperation with foreign partners.
• There is no scientific, commercial, or military value in sending people to space.
• Future expeditions to the Moon and beyond will only be politically and financially feasible if they are cut-price ventures.

He concludes that fostering good relations with other countries is insufficient justification for the expenditures, and that NASA should move aside and allow the private sector to play a role in manned space flight. The cost of these activities must lessen if they are to continue, and that will only happen with a decrease or removal of government involvement. Rees observes that only NASA deals with science, planetary exploration, and astronauts, while the private sector is allowed to exploit space commercially for things such as telecommunications. However, there is no shortage of interest in space entrepreneurship: wealthy people with a track record of commercial achievement are yearning to get involved. Rees sees space probes plastered with commercial logos in the future, just as Formula One racers are now.

Those ideas may sound radical, but not if you’ve been following the work of the Cato Institute. As long ago as 1986, Alan Pell Crawford wrote hopefully that “space commercialization … is a reality,” and looked forward to the country making progress toward a free market in space. The elimination of NASA was a recommendation in the Cato Handbook for Congress in 1999.

Edward L. Hudgins, former editor of Regulation magazine, wrote a great deal about private options in space. In 1995, he testified before the House Committee on Appropriations that the government should move out of non-defense related space activities, noting the high costs and wastefulness incurred by NASA. In 2001, Hudgins wrote “A Plea for Private Cosmonauts,” in which he  urged the United States to follow the Russians (!) in rediscovering the benefits of free markets after NASA refused to honor Dennis Tito’s request for a trip to the ISS. Hudgins testified again before the House in 2001, this time before the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. He noted that since the beginning of the Space Age, NASA has actively discouraged and barred many private space endeavors. This effectively works against the advancement and expansion of technology, while pushing out talent to foreign countries who court American scientists and researches to launch from their less-regulated facilities. In “Move Aside NASA,” Hudgins reported that neither the station nor the shuttle does much important science. This makes the price tag of $100 billion for the ISS, far above its original projected cost, unjustifiable.

Michael Gough in 1997 argued that the space “shuttle is a bust scientifically and commercially” and that both successful and unsuccessful NASA programs have crowded out private explorers, eliminating the possibility of lessening those problems. Molly K. Macauley of Resources for the Future argued in the Summer 2003 issue of Regulation that legislators and regulators had failed to take into account “the ills of price regulation, government competition, or command-and-control management” in making laws for space exploration.

We welcome the BBC and the Astronomer Royal to the cause of private, entrepreneurial exploration of the cosmos.

Hat tip to Michael Gough and Diana Lopez.

“If only we had a Republican administration in office, none of this would have happened,” my friend Deroy Murdock emailed me this morning. He meant the nationalization of two large companies, of course, though he could have been talking about a trillion-dollar spending increase, the expansion of entitlements, the federalization of education, or indeed the great leap forward to the imperial presidency.

But the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is another giant step toward government control of the economy. NPR reported this morning that the government takeover “could turn out to be a smart one.” Yes, if you think nationalization of the means of production just might work. The government is writing a blank check on the taxpayers. It might cost nothing, it might cost $25 billion, it might end up costing trillions of dollars, given the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s portfolios and the risk of further large declines in housing prices.

And speaking of the imperial presidency–all these huge new powers and expenditures are being conducted without any sanction from Congress and with little public debate. This isn’t Venezuela, but the executive branch is certainly expanding its powers on its own authority. If only President Bush would put his new powers to a public referendum, maybe a Yon Goicoechea could arise to block them. Certainly no Friedman Prize candidate has stood up in Congress.

But the Fannie-Freddie takeover is not the only bailout in the works these days. There was the Bear Stearns bailout back in March. Which might not be considered a real bailout, as Bear Stearns shareholders lost most of their investment, though it was certainly a then-unprecedented assertion of federal power. Arnold Kling noted in April that the housing bill, at least, was a pure bailout for homebuilders. Now the Big Two and a Half automobile makers are asking for $50 billion of federal help. (Didn’t we already bail out Chrysler once? How many bailouts does one company get?) And now Congress is talking about “a second economic stimulus package, totaling $50 billion in the form of money for infrastructure projects, relief for state governments struggling with rising Medicaid costs, home heating assistance for the Northeast and upper Midwest, and disaster relief for the Gulf Coast and the Midwestern flood zone.” And Transportation Secretary Mary Peters wants “an $8 billion infusion” for the federal highway trust fund. It’s a good thing that the federal government is so flush with money these days, or we might be risking a large deficit.

Capitalism is a system of profit and loss. It works because each person and each company, in seeking its own interest, is led “as if by an invisible hand” to supply goods and services that others want. Companies that satisfy consumers prosper. Companies that can’t produce goods that consumers want–like Chrysler, repeatedly–suffer and sometimes go out of business. The failures are often painful. But as Dwight Lee and Richard McKenzie wrote in their book Failure and Progress (or at least in this column based on the book), “Economic failure is to the economy what physical pain is to the body. No one enjoys pain, but without it the body would lack the information needed to maintain its health.” Government subsidies to prevent business failure simply keep pouring money into businesses that are relatively unsuccessful at satisfying consumer desires. They are, among other things, censorship of vitally needed information. Employees, entrepreneurs, and investors need to know where their money and talent are most valuable. Profits and losses are key indicators of that.

When businesses make bad decisions, they should suffer economic losses. That’s how we keep the system honest and productive. Caroline Baum of Bloomberg points out that the bailout for subprime borrowers involved helping people to stay in homes that they couldn’t afford, in many cases because they misled lenders or connived with lenders who knew they could package and resell bad mortgages. When governments make bad decisions, they should not pour good money after bad. Instead, they should try to repeal burdensome regulations, privatize functions that ought to be private, and be willing to sell purchases they shouldn’t have made, even at a loss.

Plenty of people had warned about the problems of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As Arnold Kling notes in a new Cato Briefing Paper, the current crisis ” may have been the most avoidable financial crisis in history.” Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was one of those Cassandras back in 1999. So was Lawrence J. White in a 2004 Cato Policy Analysis calling for privatization, or failing that, a clear removal of the federal guarantee for the two companies. Instead, Congress and successive administrations continued to push Fannie and Freddie to get bigger and to buy mortgages that were in clear jeopardy of default. And now, having created this crisis, the federal government proposes not to wind down the overextended companies but to take them over so they can get all the benefits of crack federal financial management. Kling proposes a better exit strategy.

Last week it was reported that Barack Obama’s acceptance speech was the most-watched convention speech ever, with 38.4 million viewers. Then, six days later, the Republican vice presidential nominee came within an inch of his record total. And then Nielsen reported that John McCain’s speech edged out Obama’s, making him the most-watched presidential nominee ever.

But there’s a footnote to this victory. Nielsen rates the audiences on commercial networks. But PBS says that 3.5 million people watched its broadcast of Obama’s speech, while only 2.7 million watched McCain on PBS. Why? Need you ask? PBS is a government-funded network for liberals. More people watched McCain on the conservative Fox News Channel, more people watched Obama on the liberal PBS. So if you add in the PBS figures, Obama probably has a very slight edge in total viewers. (Nielsen also doesn’t rate C-SPAN, which doesn’t release viewing figures.)

But does any of this matter? Dudley Clendinen reported in the New York Times [$] on August 26, 1984, that more people watched Walter Mondale’s acceptance speech than President Reagan’s. Reagan went on to win the election by 59 to 41 percent. And Jesse Jackson’s convention speech drew more viewers than either Reagan or Mondale.

And that wasn’t the only time, Clendinen reported: “Mr. Humphrey outdrew Mr. Nixon on television [in 1968], but not in the polls. The same thing happened with Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter [in 1976]. And it happened again four years ago, when President Carter lost to Ronald Reagan.”

So enjoy your Nielsen victory, Republicans. But don’t assume that a victory at the boob tube presages a victory a the ballot box.

(Footnote: I wondered if today’s candidates were really drawing more viewers than earlier nominees, in the days of three networks and no cable competition. As far as I can tell, yes they are. Reagan and Mondale in 1984 drew 19 million viewers each. Cable was already taking big bites out of the networks by then. Nielsen says that 35 million watched Jimmy Carter’s speech in 1976. He got a much larger percentage of a smaller population.)

Last night John McCain proclaimed himself the candidate of “the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan.”

One of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speeches was his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay. “He loved his country partly because it was his own country,” Lincoln declared, “but mostly because it was a free country.”

John McCain managed to give a lengthy tribute to America’s virtues without mentioning that it was a free country:

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.

Fine sentiments, and he did mention that America is “an idea, a cause worth fighting for.” But what is that idea or that cause? He didn’t say. He never mentioned the Constitution, or the Declaration, or the freedom that has made America a beacon to the world. Indeed, his message seemed less like Lincoln’s and more like John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

Last May Johan Norberg wrote a devastating critique of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. (Watch him talk about it here.) In his paper, “The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics,” he took her book apart:

The Shock Doctrine purports to be an exposé of the ruthless nature of free-market capitalism and its chief recent exponent, Milton Friedman. Klein argues that capitalism goes hand in hand with dictatorship and brutality and that dictators and other unscrupulous political figures take advantage of “shocks”—catastrophes real or manufactured—to consolidate their power and implement unpopular market reforms. …

Klein’s analysis is hopelessly flawed at virtually every level. Friedman’s own words reveal him to be an advocate of peace, democracy, and individual rights. He argued that gradual economic reforms were often preferable to swift ones and that the public should be fully informed about them, the better to prepare themselves in advance. Further, Friedman condemned the Pinochet regime and opposed the war in Iraq.

Klein’s historical examples also fall apart under scrutiny. For example, Klein alleges that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was intended to crush opposition to pro-market reforms, when in fact it caused liberalization to stall for years. She also argues that Thatcher used the Falklands War as cover for her unpopular economic policies, when actually those economic policies and their results enjoyed strong public support.

Klein’s broader empirical claims fare no better. Surveys of political and economic freedom reveal that the less politically free regimes tend to resist market liberalization, while those states with greater political freedom tend to pursue economic freedom as well.

Now Naomi Klein has responded to Norberg’s critique. (Though she can’t bring herself to name him. No point in giving your critic free advertising, calculates the author of No Logo. Norberg muses, “I think it’s because it sounds more David-and-Goliath if she is not criticised by a young Swede, but by ‘The Cato Institute.'”) And Norberg has fired back with another refutation. This time, he finds,

Her response is selective, includes new mistakes, and backs away from some of the claims that she has made without acknowledging it. …she also has nothing to say about the fact that all of her central claims are under attack

From describing Friedman–and Cato!–as neoconservatives, to slyly implying that Friedman supported land theft in Sri Lanka, to juggling statistics and years, Klein is once again revealed to be building a shocking indictment on a foundation of sand.

For a book on globalization that makes sense, skip Naomi Klein and read Johan Norberg’s In Defense of Global Capitalism.

Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, one of the big-government-conservative columnists who are all the rage with the Establishment Media, denounces Barack Obama for having “the ideology of Walter Mondale” and then calls on John McCain to adopt the ideology of Walter Mondale. Here’s his prescription for a winning acceptance speech:

McCain needs to announce new and unexpected reform proposals. Perhaps he should courageously follow the logic of his health plan and promise health coverage as a universal right guaranteed by subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance. Perhaps he should embrace the goal of getting all American electricity from renewable and non-carbon sources by some ambitious but realistic date. Perhaps he should offer guaranteed funding of higher education in exchange for national service.

With Republicans like that, who would need Democrats? If you want the big government of Walter Mondale, you might as well elect Walter Mondale, or his contemporary successor.

And of course it’s not at all clear that such a program would distinguish McCain from the Bush-Hastert-Frist Republicans who have become so unpopular. Ever since Gerson wrote for Bush the words “There is another destructive mindset: the idea that if government would only get out of the way, all our problems would be solved. An approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose than ‘Leave us alone,'” the Republican party has been eagerly embracing openhanded government. Taxpayer funding for prescription drugs. Subsidies for every form of energy. Huge increases in federal education funding. How would Gerson’s proposed agenda for McCain be “the right address for a rebel?” It would in fact confirm the Bush-McCain alliance to destroy the remnants of Goldwater-Reagan conservatism.

Why did McCain pick the governor of Alaska instead of the governor of South Carolina? Sarah Palin may well be generating more instant buzz than Mark Sanford would have. But much of it is negative, as people discuss whether someone who has been governor of a very small state for less than two years is ready to be a heartbeat away from making national security decisions. Even the devout conservative Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review can’t avert his eyes from the problem: “Palin has been governor for about two minutes. Thanks to McCain’s decision, Palin could be commander-in-chief next year. That may strike people as a reckless choice; it strikes me that way. And McCain’s age raised the stakes on this issue.”

Mark Sanford was a congressman for six years, where he served on the International Relations Commitee as well as the Joint Economic Committee. Palin has been governor of 670,000 people for about 18 months, while Sanford has served for five and a half years as governor of a state with 4.3 million people. Like Palin, Sanford is a social and economic conservative. He has taken on the Republican establishment in his state government and has a strong record on both school choice and pork-barrel spending. He has four children and a modern political wife who worked on Wall Street for six years and has managed his campaigns.

So what advantage does Palin bring to the McCain campaign that Sanford wouldn’t? Well, she’s a woman. Pure identity politics, the sort of thing Republicans deplore but often practice.

Bill Kristol says that the difference between Palin and Obama is that the Democrats are running an inexperienced guy for president, while the inexperienced Republican would only be vice president. A fair point. But as McCain himself has said, his age guarantees greater scrutiny of whether his vice presidential candidate is, as the saying goes, “ready on day one to lead.” (When I Googled that phrase, Google asked me if I meant “ready one day one to lead.” Maybe she will be, one day.)

McCain likes to talk about his 95-year-old mother. But his father died at 70 and his grandfather at 61, so his age is a real concern.

Mark Sanford would have been an experienced executive who has already dealt with national and international issues and a great next leader of the Republican party. Sarah Palin? We’ll see.

Sarah Palin may be the first woman to serve as vice president, and she would now have to be considered the most likely candidate to be America’s first woman president. But she won’t be the first woman to receive an electoral vote. That title goes to — anyone, anyone? That’s right — everyone knows that the first woman to receive an electoral vote was Geraldine Ferraro, running mate of Walter Mondale in 1984.

But no. Everyone is wrong. The actual first woman to receive an electoral vote was Tonie Nathan, the Libertarian vice presidential nominee in 1976. Nathan was a radio/television producer in Eugene, Oregon, when she attended the first presidential nominating convention of the Libertarian Party in 1972. She was selected to run for vice president with presidential candidate John Hospers, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Southern California.  Although the ticket received only 3,671 official votes, Virginia elector Roger L. MacBride chose to vote for Hospers and Nathan rather than Nixon and Agnew.

Find out more about Tonie Nathan — and the man she ran with and the man who cast his electoral vote for her — in the comprehensive new Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, which will be unveiled at Cato.org next week.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that delegates listening to Bill Clinton at the Democratic convention “waived American flags.” No doubt many of them did, but on my television a lot of them were waving American flags.

Buried in his profile of Barack Obama’s background, David Maraniss discusses one of his mother’s favorite classes at Mercer Island High School near Seattle in the late 1950s:

Their curiosity was encouraged by the teachers at Mercer Island High, especially Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who taught advanced humanities courses open to the top 25 students. The assigned reading included not only Plato and Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also late-1950s critiques of societal conventions, such as “The Organization Man” by William H. Whyte, “The Lonely Crowd” by David Riesman and “The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard, as well as the political theories of Hegel and Mill and Marx. “The Communist Manifesto” was also on the reading list, and it drew protests from some parents.

Seriously? This was the reading list? Hegel and Marx, but no Locke and Smith, the thinkers who actually revolutionized the world we live in? “Late-1950s critiques of societal conventions” like The Lonely Crowd and The Hidden Persuaders, but not Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Chambers’s Witness, or Buckley’s God and Man at Yale? Weren’t those critiques of societal convention? (True, Plato and Aristotle weren’t leftists, and Mill was a classical liberal. But there are no conservatives, free-market advocates, or contemporary libertarians.)

It’s hard to imagine that parents objected to such a reading list….

But Maraniss assures us that there was nothing leftist about it:

In tracking the Obama story this year, some conservative Web sites have seized on the high school curriculum of his mother as evidence of an early leftist indoctrination. [Her high school classmate Chip] Wall, who has spent his life challenging dogma from any ideology, and whose take on the world often veers from the politically correct, answered this interpretation with a two-word dismissal: “Oh, crap.”

Well, I wouldn’t hold Obama responsible for what his mother was taught in the Seattle suburbs before he was born. But it’s pretty clear that this high school course tilts far to the left. And of course such reading lists are even more common in college. Today the lists include more racial and gender diversity, though no more ideological diversity. And this list demonstrates that you can put together a plenty left-wing reading list composed entirely of Dead White European Men (some of whom weren’t even dead at the time).