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Space Boondoggles: NASA, STEM Subsidies

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Book cover Space Capitalism

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ((PASTCL))

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Abstract

NASA’s budget for 2015 was $1.8 billion. Would anything like this amount have been forthcoming from private investors and consumers? Not bloody likely. Hence, this amount, or something very much like it, can be considered a waste of money. The moon landing of 1969 cost some $25.4 billion. Was that worth it? There is no evidence demonstrating that it was. Then there were the Challenger and Columbia debacles. Had private enterprise been responsible for such catastrophes, new management would have supplanted the old. NASA is still in “business.” STEM subsidies further misallocate resources away from the patterns that would emerge under a regime of economic freedom.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Strictly speaking, all we are entitled to deduce is that there was something about the watch he valued more highly than the $20. It need not have been the piece of jewelry itself. For example, he didn’t really care about the watch, but he wanted to get a date with the saleswoman, and made the purchase for this reason.

  2. 2.

    In sharp contrast , both Marx (1867) and Smith (1776) suffered under an objective theory of value, namely, labor. In this view, goods and services are valued in proportion to workmen’s hours embodied in them. But this is easily shown to be fallacious. Mud pies and cherry pies require the same amount of effort to bake, but one is worth a lot, and the other nothing. Suppose 100 hours went into manufacturing an X. So, according to this theory, it is worth a certain amount of money. But later on, the prices of a complement or a substitute change, and X becomes valued at a different rate. But, it still has 100 hours of effort incorporated into it, contrary to this theory.

  3. 3.

    This “giving” of services amounts to a form of propaganda. It is the typical ploy of predators and parasites to give something enticing to the victim. Like the attractive blue bulb of the angler fish, the state offers, say, roadways. When the dupe bites, he is eaten alive.

  4. 4.

    This lack of agreement on the price applies even if the individual in question voted in favor of a tax to pay for the certain benefit. The voter has merely indicated that he would like to have the good or service as long as the lion’s share is paid by others. If he had been willing to pay the full price himself, he would have done so without taking the time to petition the government.

  5. 5.

    If the value were indeed greater than the cost, there would have been no need for the state to compel these payments. Under a regime of economic freedom, the consumers would have volunteered these monies to attain these benefits because they would have been perceived as truly beneficial. What of the free rider or public goods objection to this claim? This is refuted below under “neighborhood effects” and “public goods” in Chap. 11.

  6. 6.

    We do not count NASA employees in this calculation. We know that they valued the monies they received in salary more than the opportunity costs of their time (otherwise they would quit their jobs or not take them up in the first place). As for the taxes, in effect they paid none. It was just a book-keeping arrangement. To refer to levies paid on governmental salaries as payments is meaningless newspeak. The employee actually received as his real salary the nominal amount minus the withheld sum. The same applies to “taxes” on social security.

  7. 7.

    In 1973 dollars. In terms of present (2016) costs, the cost of the moon landing is about $150 billion.

  8. 8.

    Tang ® was, in fact, not developed for the space program (Kramer 2013).

  9. 9.

    Taxes are compulsory, the views of critics of this claim to the contrary notwithstanding.

  10. 10.

    This is reminiscent of the hysteria of the time. During a visit by the senior author of this book to one Dr. Weddell in 1957, he lectured us 11-year-old children about how Sputnik proved that the U.S. education system had failed by falling behind those “Commies.” It did nothing of the kind. It merely demonstrated that the Russians wanted to score a propaganda talking point in an area that the Americans were not at the time pursuing. This vignette is not to suggest that public schools are not seriously deficient.

  11. 11.

    Once again, we are reminded of a highschool sporting competition.

  12. 12.

    Unless, of course, they are deemed by the government “too big to fail,” yet another difficulty with statism.

  13. 13.

    And precisely who are their customers? Stockholders? No. Stakeholders? No. Government? No. The general public? Again no. Then who? Those who purchase their products! See on this Simons 2013.

  14. 14.

    No one, perhaps more so than Rand (1969). But this is exceedingly curious. One would think that a small government advocate such as she would chastise the state for going beyond what she regards as its very limited proper role: armies, courts, and the police.

  15. 15.

    Axelrod 2008; Ceglowski 2005; Hudgins 2012; Futron 2002; Kinnucan 1983; Krauss 2011; Rapp 2015; Vaughan 1996; Winsor 1988; Zeeberg 2011. Even here , no one can be sure that it counted on the debit side for everyone. A onetime friend of one of the present authors loved mishaps because he could use them in arguments proving the need for humility. He avidly scoured the newspapers for disasters and all of the details he could get. He liked to point to the pericope (a short extract from a larger work) of the Tower of Babel (לבב), Genesis 11: 1–9. The point is that without a payment mechanism, there is no way to tell whether any good or service has any value positive or negative let alone its proper price.

  16. 16.

    A case in point is the Katrina disaster. Actually, that storm missed New Orleans by some 40 miles. The approximately 1900 deaths were caused by failure of the levees to hold. And which organization was responsible for that malfeasance? The Army Corp of Engineers which is, at last look, still in existence? For more in this vein see Rockwell and Block 2010; Block and Rockwell 2007.

  17. 17.

    Technically, the cut-off time for an abort was solid fuel booster ignition.

  18. 18.

    There were two fatal failures, Challenger and Columbia , out of a total of 135 missions (NASA n.d.). Consider this fact in terms of lives lost per mission. With seven aboard, that is 14 lives or slightly more than one death for every 10 missions. Who seriously wants to face those odds? Compare these with one’s odds of dying in an automobile (0.72 deaths per 100 million passenger miles) (Maass 2013). Converting that to the number of outings, the average car trip is 14.6 miles (Green 2015). That means there is about 0.0001 (1 per 10,000) fatality per car trip as opposed to 0.1 per shuttle excursion.

  19. 19.

    Jim Backus’s Mr. Magoo was a puppet afflicted with near sightedness. It was serialized as an animated TV series (IMDb n.d.).

  20. 20.

    For more on this as well as lapses of other space agencies see Space Safety (2016).

  21. 21.

    A new field trip to Mars immerses school children in the red planet for the purpose of inspiring future astronauts. (Unreal 2016). For further information on the relation of STEM education and space exploration , see NASA n.d.; Heller 2012; Hohler 2009; Alexander and Buchsbaum 2007; Aldrin 2011.

  22. 22.

    We argue that it is not.

  23. 23.

    Typically, “capitalism” is the “usual suspect” of feminists . One must constantly remind himself that the conflation of laissez-faire with cronyism, diametric opposites, is nearly ubiquitous. In no way does the system of laissez-faire capitalism put down women for they are completely free to compete on an equal basis as is everyone else. Rather, it is the socialistic tendencies embedded within Otto von Bismarck’s welfare laws, the Fabian Society, the British Labour Party, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party that create the need to exploit entire groups of people, such as females. Even when the political winds change and previously disparaged demographics become favored, such favoritism takes a form proclaimed to be compensation for past injustice but which in fact leads to dependency.

  24. 24.

    Proportionately, more of them than men will be working only part time as they have babies; or will quit entirely.

  25. 25.

    Friedman a socialist? Was he not one of the foremost and well known capitalists (Friedman/Donahue 1979)? So he was reputed to be. Yet, we have the temerity to refer to him as a socialist. The reason is much deeper than the cited passage which indicates approval of state-run schools. More essential to the Chicago monetarist school, his philosophy, is the approval of a state-owned central bank. Banks and schools are first-order means of production. Government ownership of them is an important aspect of socialism. If a nation’s money is socialized, how can that country be free? If a legal tender law mandates the use of a single currency, then, obviously, the system is not that of laissez-faire . For further critiques of this author along these lines see Berliner 19991995, p. 326; Block 1999, 2003, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2013; Block and Barnett 2012–2013; Block and Friedman 2006; Friedman 2000; Kinsella 2009; Lind 2012; Long 2006 ; Marcus 2007; McChesney 1991; North 2012; Machan 2010; McChesney 1991; Rand n.d.; Rothbard 2002; Sennholz 2006; Vance 1996, 2005; Wapshott 2012; Wenzel 2012; Wilcke 1999. States Friedman (2000)himself: “In the middle of a debate on the subject of distribution of income, in which you had people who you would hardly call socialist or egalitarian—people like Lionel Robbins, like George Stigler , like Frank Knight, like myself—Mises got up and said, ‘You’re all a bunch of socialists,’ and walked right out of the room.” Here is Rand’s (n.d.) view of Friedman and Stigler 1946: “‘collectivist propaganda’ and ‘the most pernicious thing ever issued by an avowedly conservative organization’” (cited in Skousen 2001).

  26. 26.

    Could one make the case, and many people do, that the repeated reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance commits one to remain a ward of the state? Not bloody likely. First of all, it is mainly children that do so. They can hardly be considered capable of making such thorough and far-reaching commitments. Secondly, for so momentous an agreement, any sensible court would likely rule that it would have to be in writing, signed, and notarized.

  27. 27.

    Why do we characterize these widely-esteemed institutions of higher learning as “people’s republics”? The lead author of this book attended the University of California, Berkeley , starting in 1967 and found it the most provincial community he ever experienced. There was, at the time of his residence, an orthodoxy which could not be publicly challenged. Even private disputation of the accepted convention with a professor was verboten. It appears to us that many other highly ranked colleges and universities have adopted the same or a similar ethos. That canon was leftist, even Marxist, in nature. The term “people’s republics” is widely used by communist regimes which restrict free speech and, hence, constitutes an apt metaphor for these communities. More recently, non-leftist speakers such as Milo Yianopolous and Ann Coulter have been in effect banned from this institution of “higher learning” as has been Charles Murray from its sister school, Vermont’s Middlebury College.

  28. 28.

    States Hayek (1979, pp. 52–53): “And it is probably no exaggeration to say that every important advance in economic theory during the last hundred years was a further step in the consistent application of subjectivism.”

  29. 29.

    Of course, as unbelievable as it is, states do make demands in such topics as appropriate clothing, bathing, etc. sometimes sending out police to take measurements (The Young Turks 2016). Libertarians disapprove.

  30. 30.

    With the possible exception of economics, which has one foot in the humanities, but another in more technical disciplines. Whether for good or not, the two co-authors of this book have between them degrees in engineering, economics, history, and divinity. Speaking authoritatively from personal experience, STEM generally amounts to technical training whereas the humanities tends towards education per-se so long as the student can see through the propaganda that all too often passes for education. The current modern usage of the term “education” encompasses no fewer than three at best marginally related concepts: education (learning how to function in the world in which we exist: philosophy, history, etc.), technical training (learning how to perform specific tasks: engineering, cooking, etc.), and propaganda (exposure to the preferred myths of the powers who wish to impose their will on others: civics, political studies, etc.).

  31. 31.

    See on this Boettke 2001; Ebeling 1993; Hayek 1948; Hoff 1981; Hoppe 1989; Von Mises 1922 , 1977.

  32. 32.

    A sub-atomic particle predicted by Peter Higgs.

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  1. PL Nelson Engineering Inc., Lakewood, CO, USA

    Peter Lothian Nelson

  2. Loyola University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Walter E. Block

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Nelson, P.L., Block, W.E. (2018). Space Boondoggles: NASA, STEM Subsidies. In: Space Capitalism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74651-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74651-7_10

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74650-0

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