It's the Freakiest Show

Alex Tabarrok is sure there's a better way to blow a few hunded billion dollars than building a moon base. (And the public, apparently, tends to agree.) Economist Glen Whitman has a controversial proposal: Clone a defect-free human by 2015. Somehow, I don't see them jumping at that one. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds calls for a "Wild West approach" to space settlement.

Comments

[shane]

If we reiled on polls or majorities for every plan or action, individual liberty would no longer exist.

[joe]

I'm from the government, and I've seen this before; we can do something really neat if we have the funding, so lets look around and find some place to do it, and some justification for why it should be done. That's exactly backwards. If we have the money to pay for this, then we should be asking what our goals are, and how we can achieve them. What important goal is met by building a moon base?

My sci-fi suggestion - desalinization plants in California, so they can stop sucking dry the rest of the southwest.

[Jon H]

"Wild West approach": Mormons in Space?

[Russ]

Hmmm, how about using the money to fund severance packages for 90% of government employees and shutting down the alphabet soup of agencies and departments that have been foisted upon us over the last two centuries?

DEA, ATF, ONDCP, FDA, OSHA, HUD, EPA, FTC, FCC, BLM, USDA, DOE, FAA, DOT, FEMA, FDIC, EEOC, SSA, NASA...

Come to think of it, a moon base is more probable.

[Kirsten Tynan]

I don't read Glenn really "calling" for a Wild West approach so much as apologizing on Bush's behalf and sort of excusing him for not pursuing such an approach. Elsewhere in the piece Glenn calls for a more ambitious plan from the government than what has been hinted at thus far. It's hard to think of this guy as much of an advocate for private space development (as opposed to government-subsidized space development utilizing private companies).

[Dan]

If we reiled on polls or majorities for every plan or action, individual liberty would no longer exist.

Um... ok. If your argument is that passing every law the majority wants would be a threat to individual liberty, you are correct.

But this is a case of the majority of the people wanting the government to NOT pass a law, and NOT spend a bunch of money on something. In no way can that ever be a threat to individual liberty.

My suggestion -- given the assumption that we're doomed to spend a few hundred bil on SOMETHING, and just get to choose what to spend it on -- would be to fund nothing directly, but instead set up a large number of "prizes" for different achievements in engineering and science, with the requirement that the technology developed must be made public domain in order for the prize to be claimed.

[Kirsten Tynan]

I'm not big on the idea of government-offered prizes.

First, they would be somewhat competitive with privately offered prizes possibly undermining them.

Second, "judging" allows plenty of leeway for throwing the bucks to a pre-determined "winner". See the defense industry for examples of rather subjectively determined contract "winners".

And third, this process allows government to subsidize certain politcally-preferred paths in technological development. A more efficient path or solution may not be developed if it becomes more likely to be profitable for companies to proceed down a less efficient path which has been predetermined politically. It's just bad science to let politicians and bureaucrats steer the ship.

[Dan]

First, they would be somewhat competitive with privately offered prizes possibly undermining them.

Why would they compete? If a private individual offers $150,000,000 for a successful moon landing and the government offers $1,000,000,000, the first person to successfully pull off a new moon landing pockets $1,150,000,000. That's not competition; that's added incentive.

"judging" allows plenty of leeway for throwing the bucks to a pre-determined "winner".

Like I said, my suggestion presumed that we were already stuck with a big government program. A "prize" for "first Mars colony" is vastly less likely to show political favoritism than one of NASA's standard SpacePork programs -- for example, they could not get away with saying that Lockheed Martin "really won" the race to Mars if the footage of their touchdown features a small crowd of Martian colonists waving at the newcomers. 🙂

more efficient path or solution may not be developed if it becomes more likely to be profitable for companies to proceed down a less efficient path which has been predetermined politically.

That is not correct. The current system works that way, because it rewards effort, not success. Establishing a reward solely for the goal, and not for the path, encourages people to find the most efficient path to success.

For example: right now, we blow a LOT of government money looking for an "AIDS vaccine". Is this a good idea? What if a vaccine isn't the answer? Come up with a good, specific definition of "curing HIV infection", and establish a prize for meeting that goal -- then you encourage people to get results, not noodle around in a lab for 20 years.

[Jason Ligon]

I just don't want it to turn out like the Grammys, Dan ...

[Jason Ligon]

Does anybody in the know think we could get productive fusion for $100 billion?

[cdunlea]

The only problem I see with Reynold's idea is: what if one the main developers of the moon colony is bin Laden? He surely has the money and the mindset to set up a moon base a la Dr. Evil.

Anyone ever read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?" That would be scary with a terrorist in charge.

[Sean]

A friend of mine pointed out that the actual moonbase is a wasted investment but the technologies created under the crunch of trying to do it under a certain cost (however improbable as that may sound) may be of greater benefit.

[Dan]

I just don't want it to turn out like the Grammys

The Grammys are an example of rewarding effort, not results.

Look at the Orteig prize for transatlantic flight, or the X-Prize for reusable spacecraft. Those are result-oriented prizes.

[shane]

Umm...okay Dan, so the next time a POLL is cited showing a simple majority favoring more environmental regulation, education spending, and government run health care, and why we should do those things, don't complain.

"Polls show..." talk is ridiculous especially coming from libertarians.

[shane]

Dan:
"But this is a case of the majority of the people wanting the government to NOT pass a law, and NOT spend a bunch of money on something. In no way can that ever be a threat to individual liberty."

Sure it can. If your statement were correct, we wouldn't need the bill of rights.

[Kirsten Tynan]

Shane, please give an example in which individual liberty is threatened as a result of a government not passing a law or not spending money.

[Kirsten Tynan]

Re: competition with private prizes

Sure private individuals or organizations could just tack on their funds to government-sponsored prizes. But would they? What for? What?s the value added to the lives of those who offer the prize for doing so? And what about prizes which depend on donations from many individuals? It seems likely to me that fewer individuals will donate to such prizes since the government is already doing it (similar to how some people don?t donate as much to charity when they are already taxed for welfare programs). So, indeed, I do think that government would compete somewhat with private prizes. I leave ?somewhat? in there because I don?t know how much competition there would be.

Re: political favoritism

Your proposed prize for the ?first Mars colony? leaves plenty of room for subjective judgment. What counts as a colony? When does it count as being established (which feeds into who was first)? Surely such a prize as offered by the government would include a vast bureaucratic array of regulatory minutia which also leaves the door open for disqualifying undesirable based on technicalities. In a dispute between a private contestant and a private prize-offerer, you would at least have some semblance of opportunity for third-party dispute resolution. Not so when the government both offers the prize and adjudicates disputes related thereto. Since the government has no reputation to protect, the threat of ugly publicity offers no measure of protection here either.

Re: goal-oriented prizes

Sure, the government *could* offer a goal-oriented prize without respect to the path taken. However, this is typically not how government pork works. You?ve just increased the number of unlikely/unrealistic stipulations you are making for the sake of discussion. At a certain point I start to wonder what the point of the discussion is. We could just stipulate that we can all get our money back and be done with it.

I?ll add this to my previous list of reasons I oppose government prizes:

They encourage the mentality that we couldn?t do X or Y without help from the government.

[Kate]

Glen Whitman's proposal to clone a "defect free" human suggests he keep his day job as an economist.

There is no such thing as defect free genetic status - for example, some genes that predispose one to some forms of disease can protect the same individual from others. Many genes interact seamlessly with environmental factors. Immune systems that have evolved to protect us may choose to attack the digestive tract in autoimmune response, when intestinal parasites are eliminated. Are they abnormal, or is the environment?

There is no perfect, healthy genetic status, just as there is no perfect balance of nature. The systems are far too complex to allow for that, as the key ingredient to species survival is not perfection, but flexibility. The genetic diversity that allows for that flexibility carries with it genetic cost in the form of defects.

[shane]

Kirsten, that was Dan's answer to my original post. My point was that polls showing majorities should not be used by libertarians as reason to NOT support something when they support liberty, which is based on the ANTITHESIS of majority rule.

Kirsten:
"Shane, please give an example in which individual liberty is threatened as a result of a government not passing a law or not spending money."

Property rights.

[shane]

Also, government can threaten property rights.

The forces arrayed against one another help secure it.

Someone, somewhere, will ALWAYS try to force someone into a situation in their favour.

😉

[Will Spencer]

I'd like to unify, motivate and inspire the nation with the idea of cutting my goddamned taxes.

[Julian Sanchez]

Kate-
That was actually my (in retrospect poorly worded) paraphrase of Glen's proposal. What he actually said was "a human without serious physiological defects."