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Re: "People" get the government that they deserve
Posted by Reality (more from Reality) on Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:09:19
In Reply to: Re: "People" get the government that they deserve, John G, Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:17:42
Please don't kill yourself (after saying your "peace.") LOL. People make mistakes all the time; to err is to be human, there is no need to be ashamed of mistakes, and certainly no need to kill yourself over simple misconceptions.

Here's the fundamental problem with government centralized space research: it takes away human talent and material resources, and use them in a way that is inefficient and usually highly wasteful. The issue is not space research or no space research, but whether such research should be monopolized by the government. Monopoly breeds hubris, and human beings are prone to errors to begin with. Take a look at Franklin's expedition to find the Northwest Passage. They were lavishly provisioned, several dozen explorers, many of whom had real talent, with barrels/heaps of gun powder to move around even after their two ships froze in ice, yet they were too proud to ask the local innuits where to hunt food to keep themselves alive, eventually resorting to cannibalism before the death of every single member of that government-sponsored expedition team.

For comparison John Rae's and Roald Amundsen's private teams each had handful of people, learned from natives for arctic survival skills, found the passage and survived the expeditions. The irony was that John Rae even brought back information about the lost Franklin expedition, yet due to typical government bureaucratic hubris, his findings were vehemently denounced by the establishment for a century until even more physical evidence surfaced to prove him in the right.

BTW, the NASA budget is close to $20B/yr, not $2B/yr, my typo in previous post. It takes up the scientific minds and material that could be better utilized in the private sector. If you think the government is so smart at allocating resources, why don't we have the government monopolize food production? We already know the answer: every country ever tried that always ends up having massive famine because the government monopoly is incapable of allocating resources efficiently. That's for food production, a field where the general outline of knowledge is already well know. If government can't even do that right what are the chances that it has the ability to allocate limited resources and human talents to specific avenues of research (vs. the alternatives routes of attack) in a field that is literally unknown?




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