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On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Jonathan King wrote:
On 12/5/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Jonathan King wrote:
>> I would say that you are wrong about manned space flight and wars in
>> Asia only because such wars kill many thousands of good people and
>> manned space flights will only kill a few dozen people.
>
> You are *so* wrong. In both cases, the answer to the question of how
> many people needlessly die is hundreds of thousands or millions. Money
> can be spent usefully to save lives and improve the world.
And that will happen when? After you say a magic word and snap your
fingers? Seriously -- tell me your plan for making this happen.
I don't know when it will happen, but I know that a truly lousy first
step is to squander the cash on manned space travel. In other words, I
don't know exactly how to save the world, but I know now to make doing
that harder, and I think that's a useful first step.
It's not so much that you *know* it but that it is your opinion,
unsupported by any convincing evidence. I'm not saying that you are
wrong, just that you don't really know that you are right. I think it is
better to keep an open mind about various theories until we can come up
with either testable theories or approaches that we know will work.
> For probably 10 percent of what we're spending in Iraq, we could
> probably finally irradicate every remaining "childhood" disease. For
> another 10 percent or so, we could vastly upgrade the infrastructure
> for providing clean drinking water.
Are you the first person to think of that? No? Then why hasn't it
happened already? Believe me, I'm surrounded (as you probably are) by
people who are very concerned about such things and there are millions
more like them. So why isn't the US government listening to people
like them, and like you, and spending money to save sick children
instead of spending it on warfare?
Or spending it on manned space travel, which (I am amazed to say) does
probably even less good. (Soldiers who are euphemistically called "peace
keepers" have sometimes been surprisingly effective when they are used
as part of a diplomatic solution.
The money will go into high-tech weaponry, not into soldiers' paychecks.
Clearly, we still live in the shadow of the Cold War. In the Clinton
administration, we managed to avoid escalating the size of the military,
and our diplomacy was rather more effective than it is today.
Here's a good question: What was different under Clinton? I think the
trend is obvious: Under Republican presidents in the past 25 years, we've
seen massive, out-of-control defense spending:
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/national_debt.png
That looks to me like the MICC really taking control of our government.
I can see that Republicans do worse than Democrats in terms of deficit
spending, but that isn't *because* they are "Republicans" (an almost
meaningless concept), it may be because they owe money and favors to
certain corporations. Can those favors not be paid in space contracts
instead of in weapons contracts? I agree it is better to do away with
favors and to have neither kind of contract (except when truly needed) but
that is not a realistic option, or at least I don't know how to get there
from here.
Historically, there have been situations where the US and other great
powers have actually managed to do some good things. I think this has
happened either when they were trying to win prestige points (e.g., the
Peace Corps starts in the Cold War era, when Soviet largesse was also at
a peak) or when we were utterly shamed into doing something.
If you know how to make that happen again, let me know.
There is always some limit. Money is constantly being moved from one
place to another place. They don't *just* print more money every time
they want to spend some!
By definition, the federal government has been doing just that. They
print bonds, and people buy them. How long can we go on this way? I'm
not sure. I don't see this as a reason to propose spending that is known
to be a complete boondoggle.
I thought you might ignore the word "just" so I put asterisks around it
but that didn't really work either. It isn't merely a problem of
sustainability. The American people don't like what is happening and they
oppose most government spending. So there is always pressure not to spend
along with the pressure to spend.
Mike
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