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Today
Baghdad, Tomorrow Barsoom?
by
Roderick Long
On
January 10th, the London Telegraph,
in a story titled “George
W. Bush boldly goes to Mars,” hailed Bush’s plans for a manned
Mars mission as an expression of “mankind’s loftiest ambitions.”
Now I’m as big a fan of space exploration as anyone. I long to see Mars
and other planets visited, colonised, even terraformed. I’ve watched the
progress of the latest Mars rover with fascination. Indeed, the need to
renounce NASA was probably the biggest hurdle for me in becoming a
libertarian originally. But I cannot endorse a space exploration program
led by an institution both inept and criminal, and funded by extortion.
The Telegraph lectures us: “To begin such an endeavour at a time
when the US government is already running a large budget deficit is, in
its way, heroic . . . . It would be nice if those who habitually dismiss
the President as selfish and insular would for once acknowledge his
largesse.”
The terms “heroic” and “largesse” would apply if Bush were putting
up his own money. When instead he proposes to fleece the taxpayers –
taxpayers already cringing in the shadow of Bush’s looming deficits,
which dwarf his laughable “tax cuts” – the appellations seem grossly
misplaced.
A nonviolent approach to space exploration is perfectly possible: get the
State off the economy’s back, thereby freeing up the resources and
efficiency of the market sector to fund a cheaper and less militarised
private space program. (See the marvelous satire How
the West Wasn’t Won.) But this would be disaster for the
bureaucratic/corporate plutocracy that plans to milk the U.S. taxpayers
for billions of dollars.
The Telegraph acknowledges that in “strictly practical terms,”
Bush’s Mars project makes “little sense,” but gushes: “Americans,
thank Heaven, do not always think in strictly practical terms.” The Mars
mission, we’re told, will “ennoble every member of the human race.”
The original meaning of the word “ennoble” is “confer an unearned
income on special interests by government fiat at the expense of exploited
serfs.” Someone’s going to get ennobled, alright.
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