Dominic Wellington see the hate filled collectivist attitude to private sector space flight as being the same attitude which feeds poverty in places where such sentiments actually control the political process
Rand Simberg points to this article in The Washington Dispatch. The author, Mark Whittington, writes about the sophomoric class-envy editorials on the X-Prize that have appeared recently in the UK press. Excerpt:
An editorial in The Scotsman on October 3rd [online here] seemed to set the tone. “Virtually every child does fantasise about space travel,” The Scotsman sneered. “But most then grow up. Branson reckons he will have no difficulty attracting customers for his space venture. Sadly, he’s probably right. Arrested development is a common trait among the super-rich, a fact which explains the market for Lotuses and Lamborghinis.”
Speaking as someone who would love a Lotus or a Lamborghini, and would kill for a ride into space on one of Mr Branson’s craft, I have no idea what the Scotsman editorial writer has been smoking. What is his problem?
Well, actually, I know perfectly well what his problem is – he thinks that nobody should be rich, and we should all live in dour council flats and drive Ladas and Trabants. I only have one response to that, and it’s not printable.
I do not have much time for those who inherit wealth and squander it, but self-made men or people who work with their inheritance and grow it command my full respect. This is one of the reasons why I like Berlusconi and his kids. He came from nowhere, and made some very clever deals. Nobody would have bet on private TV in Italy when he was buying stations up, but once it took off the howls of outrage from slower competitors and suddenly obsolete State broadcasters were deafening. The same sort of thing happened with many of his real-estate deals. His kids, with an inheritance the size of the national debt, are working their tails off in the family businesses.
Gerard DeGroot, the bitter ankle-biter of the Scotsman, is instead a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Surprisingly, he approves of space travel per se – see for instance this Christian Science Monitor article from earlier this year – it is just private space travel that he dislikes. I wonder how he can combine the vitriol quoted above with positive sentiments such as the following:
Through history, every vibrant culture has pushed horizons outward. They’ve done so not simply because of the practical benefits of exploration, but also because discovery is a touchstone of cultural vigor.
I would argue that individuals doing things for their own reasons and benefit are much more of a “touchstone of cultural vigor” than massive State-run programs dropped onto the populace.
There is an expression in Italian: cattedrali nel deserto. Literally, it means ‘cathedrals in the desert’. It refers to the practice of building a shiny new factory, motorway, hospital or whatever in the economically backward South of Italy. The problem with this practice was – is – that the factory had no workers or transport links, or the motorway went from nowhere to nowhere, or there were no doctors to work in the hospital. These projects were as absurd as building a great cathedral in the desert, far from any worshippers. The ‘cathedrals’ bred only corruption, and many of them never even entered service. This is what State-run projects look like.
By contrast, the North of Italy, which has a GDP on a level with Switzerland and fearsome productivity, is driven entirely by small to medium businesses. Sure, there are a couple of Fiat-sized colossi, but mainly we’re talking little companies that you’ve never heard of, that are making their owners rich, that bring jobs to the area, and that supply such a level of diversity and resilience to the economy that it can drag the South along with it into Europe without being crippled or even slowed down too much.
The entrepreneurs driving this new space race and their prospective super-rich passengers are productive members of a vigorous culture. Gerard DeGroot and his intellectual compatriots, despite pretensions to the contrary, are most emphatically not.
I thought they liked John Kerry?
I doubt Burt Rutan is considered a super rich aristocrat.
So maybe its not so much class envy as it is intelligence or ingenuity envy.
> This is what State-run projects look like.
Like the internet… oh wait.
The internet wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for States, and the internet wouldn’t be successful if it weren’t for private enterprise. Libertarianism and Statism are like all other isms: at their worst when at their most extreme.
Infant industries always start off as markets for the rich. Automobiles, VCRs, silk, chocolate, literature. But as time goes on, efficiencies of scale and new technologies creep in, and the industry in question becomes affordable to the less affluent. Except for silk, every one of the items I mentioned is owned by the majority of America’s poor. Their day in space will come. Give it time.
Oh that old deterministic canard again. ARPA was not the modern internet. All you need for the internet to develop is the invention of the telephone.
Try reading some Bastiat before deciding what ‘wouldn’t be here’… just because something happened a certain way, that does not mean that was the only way it could have happened.
Oh that old deterministic canard again. ARPA was not the modern internet. All you need for the internet to develop is the invention of the telephone.
There’s quite a bit more to it than that. You need quite a few other changes to the way data and information are served and stored, not to mention proper routing technology. We’ve had a few _false starts_ in the internet space. The old teletext style BBS system, France’s Minitel and so forth. There’s a universe out there where Usenews is still the _internet_. The internet we have not is a bit of an aberation. It’s certainly not what any of the businesses involved in the early days wanted. Certainly not AOL and M$.
Charles Fergusson’s High Stakes: No Prisoners, again, is the seminal work on the birth of the net; the most likely outcome was probably MSN becomming the defacto net standard sometime in the late 90s, early 00s.
The all singing, all dancing “free” internet has been something of a pain for business since day one. The mobile network operators are working tirelessly to ensure that they don’t repeat the mistakes of the first line operators when it comes to data. Although the jury is still out on that one.
And again, many of the technologies in use for the present climb to space were financed and tested by the State.
Rocket engines and the such were developed for the express purpose of efficient killing; I just don’t see how private enterprise could cough up the funds to explore the thousand and one blind alleys in research and to learn the lessons from those failures to find that single payoff path. No single entity could match the state in being able to do it, either in the past, or even now(Maybe M$ can, I dunno).
There is still something to be said for the brute force coercive power of the state, even if it was for things like war and nationalism.
TWG
The state can supply unrivalled resources and focus on crash projects with a well-defined and realistic objective (e.g., “let’s land a couple of guys on the Moon ASAP”).
The state cannot make such enterprises viable. They can only be kept up if there is an overarching goal. The problem is that this goal does not have to correspond to the original objective. NASA has devolved into pork-barrel politics, and the whole area of space-related work has languished for far too long.
A state-run project might have come up with the steam engine, but it would also have ensured that a few government-owned and -operated steam engines were all the locomotion needed. Because steam engines and then internal combustion engines were put into private hands, we have power to transport people or goods with an ease that would have been almost unimmaginable a historical eye-blink ago.
To The Wobbly Guy: Private enterprise allows for more dead ends because there are so many individuals making choices. State enterprises have to slow down the whole process to avoid making “wrong” choices, and of course miss out on a lot of data that way, as well as taking more time and effort to achieve any result at all.
The interesting thing I find about the Internet is that it’s one of a very small number of technologies disproportionately developed by the State (along with GPS) — and that such technologies seem to come about as a result of State R&D in defense. Those statists who talk most about how we need the State to engage in more R&D are usually the same group of statists (from the left) who hate defense spending.
Talking of the X prize did anyone else watch the wonderful documentaries on this subject on the Discovery channel last night. Of course the BBC barely mentioned this when it happened but last night Discovery devoted 3 hours to 2 documentaries looking at the first flights of Spaceship 1. The pictures were brilliant but even better was the fact the program treated its audience as though they were adults and there was no dumbing down Horizon style.
Perry de haviland points out (rightly) that just because things worked out one way (a big state role in high-tech industries) it need not be that way. But that argument can be used the other way as well.
Just because things have worked out with a (predominantly) private-sector economy in the modern-day US or UK does not mean they couldn’t also have worked out well with a more state-run economy.
No doubt people will point out that state run economies have done pretty abysmally and i would agree that some market incentives are needed to spur growth. However, those economies that have been planned have also been those that have been poorer to start with (with the possible exception of E Germany) and they have also had to endure more in the way of wars and crises than the West (for example, less than 1% of inhabitants of the US or UK died in the war but 15% or so of inhabitants of the USSR or Poland).
To Perry:
Bastiat is a pretty good cure for economic ignorance…especially “What is Seen and What is Not Seen.” (He also happens to be my hero.) Thanks for “plugging” him….
Richard E.
Mr DeGroot has much in common with Ellsworth Toohey, I’d imagine
That book has been on my Amazon wish-list for a while now – maybe the time has come to buy it (once I finish The System of the World, that is).
As much as the USA loves its freedom the Revolutionaries almost set up a new aristocratic oligarchy of their own – fortunately the freethinkers and democrats nipped that in the bud. Else the USA would be much more like its poorer Southern cousins.
Hernando de Soto I think has pretty successfully shown that the chief thing keeping the poor in poverty is not a lack of State control but a State being set up to control things for a pre-existing oligarchy.
Hence the entrepreneurial spirit is shackled by corrupt and corruptible bureaucracy and negation of viable competition by established wealth. A State that catalyses enterprise, even by doling out seed capital and building vital infrastructure, is the opposite of the State run by officials climbing a Party ladder for their own gain. Success in enterprise, not earning brownie points with higher-ups, should be the only true measure for any set-up, State or private. How badly has NASA been hamstrung by being used as a pork-barrel dispenser by Congress?
I am bit disappointed to see this sort of sneering crap from the Scotsman. One of its regular editorial columnists is John Blundell, of the IEA, and all-round good fellow.
I love that line about “arrested development”. Yeah, Bill Gates and Richard Branson are just big kids. For big kids with silly ideas, they seem to be doing rather well, in contrast to your average snooty hack.