Energy is too important to be left to the people who run the DMV and the Post Office. Its sort of an odd position for a socon, but I’ll quote Ayn Rand….the thing that the have-not nations have not is capitalism.
It does little good for Africans to have something without rule of law. Witness Mugabe who took successful farms and stole them and gave them to his thugs who promptly ran them into the ground.
Your third para. starting with ‘the left will cause’ is correct, almost. In the current environment with a massive government, its unrealistic to assume that gov’t won’t be involved. Gov’t frequently creates the problems that it later solves. But its not empty sloganeering….its a pole star so that those with a conservative bent don’t end up getting lost and finding themselves by degrees turning to liberal plans.
I’m okay with X Prizes, for now. If we hadn’t been crippled by gov’t, we wouldn’t need them, but we are, and so we have to deal with the mess as it is.
I’m aware that gov’t sets the field with basic regulations and it should. Coolidge told Wall Street that without laws their property would be worth as much as a corner lot in Babylon.
I do not accept that gov’t investment for major projects is needed. The farmers in the Central Valley shipped their goods by mule train, and did all right. It wasn’t economical to put in a railroad, but with gov’t help it got done. A victory for your viewpoint, right? Then the railroad used its economic muscle to crush the farmers, and to bribe congress to keep other competitors out. And people blamed capitalism.
Creating the arena, certain minimal and obvious effects like X Prizes can be worthwhile, but most of the problems gov’t solves, it created. Robber barons were the creation of gov’t..
The concept you’re looking for is ‘enumerated powers’. A gov’t strong in certain areas, but only those areas avoids the twin perils of weakness and anarchy on the one hand, and strength and tyranny on the other.
Thus yes, we spend a lot on defense. Its one of the enumerated powers. Space programs aren’t.
Its probable that the best thing the gov’t could do to advance the space program is to get out of the way. Even if not, freedom is more important than prosperity.
If the gov’t had a stable currency, and a reasonable regulatory environment, I believe we could come up with the money to exploit space and build a SPS. One of the chief problems with such a program is that the owners would no doubt be sued into oblivion by enviromentalists freaked out about a microwave beam landing in the dessert somewhere at an antenna farm.
Now, I’m a conservative, and not a libertarian, so I admit the usefulness of some gov’t action, but its far more modest I suspect than a ‘big government conservative’ would like.
