So the latest uproar being generated on social media is the left-wing attempt to cancel the capitalist space race in which Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson and Elon Musk seem to be in some kind of competition to get themselves in orbit with various private space programs. The Left’s opposition to this is almost as superficial and useless as the billionaires’ own publicity efforts, though to be sure, bitching about them on Twitter costs a lot less. And that is kind of the point. Robert Reich on Twitter: “With just their increased wealth during the pandemic, America’s billionaires could pay for 10 years of the Child Tax Credit that goes into effect today for one year, cutting child poverty by half. And they’d still be as wealthy as they were before the pandemic. “
Ha Ha Ha. Right.
The budget bill for fiscal year 2021 – passed under a Republican president, mind you – was 4.829 trillion dollars. Now never mind the deficit this causes, because deficits clearly don’t matter to either ruling faction. A trillion is a million million. As in, one trillion of a quantity is one followed by twelve zeroes. A billion is a thousand million. As in, one billion is one followed by nine zeroes. A trillion is a thousand billion. As Nathan Lane might say, “do the math.”
The level of money that government, specifically the US federal government, operates with is an actual exponent of what most billionaires get to work with. Even the richest guy on earth, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is worth $214 billion, at least according to USA Today. Forbes puts it at “only” $193.5 billion. Let’s say we round to $200 billion. Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God (and probably more than the Catholic Church) would need to multiply his wealth almost by 25 to get as much as Washington already has.
So if we’re not feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and solving climate change and all the other stuff, it’s because of the government we have now, because that government could be doing all those things right now cause it already has more money than Jeff Bezos will ever have, and if for some reason it actually needs more it can just rocket the deficit farther past the stratosphere than Richard Branson will ever get. And that would be the case whether we had a 90 percent tax rate on the upper class or not.
I had mentioned a while ago that there was one event in my life that had as much to do with me becoming a right-libertarian as anything Ayn Rand ever wrote. Believe it or not, it was Live Aid. To briefly recap: I like a lot of young adults at that time contributed to the Live Aid fundraising campaign to get food and support to the starving in Ethiopia, because Bob Geldof and the other organizers of the Live Aid campaign did make a convincing case that enough people working together could solve the world’s problems. But then after the money was raised and the food was delivered to the Horn of Africa, Geldof and his people found that a lot of it was left to rot on the docks while some of it was actually confiscated by the Ethiopian government to use as leverage against its own people.
The lesson I got is that even when there is collective action from private actors, and even when that is backed up by some governments, the government on the ground can burn all that altruism and effort to dust. Because if government has far more scale to do good than any one philanthropist, it has far more scale to do evil than any individual criminal.
In the case I mentioned, the people getting in the way of feeding the world were the Communists running Ethiopia, but in the modern day the obstacle is a faction that is even more vicious, collectivist and devoted to Russian ideology: The Republican Party.
This is especially obvious in regard to their state voter suppression efforts, but I have already touched on those to some extent. With regard to the subject at hand, it was indeed a liberal (Jack Kennedy) initiative that got America first to the moon. It was the government, under NASA, that first had to get us to space. According to Wikipedia, NASA’s share of the total federal budget peaked at around 4.41 percent during the Apollo project, but by 1975 (after we’d reached the moon more than once) it declined to 1 percent and actually decreased from there. “Despite this, public perception of NASA’s budget differs significantly: a 1997 poll indicated that most Americans believed that 20% of the federal budget went to NASA.” In a March 2012 hearing of the United States Senate Science Committee, science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson testified that “Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.”
But for practical purposes, our government doesn’t really have a space program.
Oh, but it has Space Force. Yes. Cheeto Jesus himself, our small-government, tax cutting, regulation cutting Greatest President Capitalism Ever Had decided to add a bureaucracy to our already bloated government for reasons I still cannot explain. It’s not like Trump seems to grasp Gene Roddenberry’s message of peace, reason and infinite diversity, much less George Lucas’ moral that maybe turning a flawed Republic into a blatantly evil Empire isn’t such a good move in the long run. But in any event, we now have a Space Force, even though in five years no one has told me what the fuck it does.
What, are we handing out parking tickets to Martians? Are we busting the illegal smuggling trade in Green Orion Slave Women? What is this?
Now given that there is a real national security interest in protecting our satellite network and responding to any Russian or Chinese attempts to weaponize space, you would think this alleged branch of our military would have some kind of military shuttle program. A monitoring system. But have they explained what we’re actually spending the money on? As far as I can tell the US Space Force’s only official expenditure is for the field uniforms that are done in standard BDU/desert camo, y’know, cause apparently that’s the color pattern you need to camouflage yourself IN FUCKING SPACE.
If you wonder why these nose-in-the-air billionaires are investing their wherewithal in space exploration, well, it’s because we used to have a government that did that for the country, and we don’t any more. So why not them?
Now, there is one aspect to this leftist complaining that is completely legitimate. To such extent as NASA actually exists, it seems to exist to outsource its former charter to these guys for their space side projects. NASA provided $2.9 billion to Musk’s Space X to build a moon lander. New Mexico, “one of the poorest states in the US”, paid $220 million to build “Spaceport America” for Branson.
However, I don’t see government spending taxpayer money for billionaires who could pay their own way as a big endorsement for more government spending. It does however help explain why things are the way they are. Libertarians have been pointing out for years that the problem with our government being as big as it is is that its power and money makes it a more attractive target for business to manipulate. But the other side of the matter is that government would rather hand out money to billionaires and corporations than homeless and powerless people because the corporations and rich guys can actually do something for them. In the Business Insider article, they focus on the small town of Truth or Consequences (which, ironically, took its name to attract publicity from the audience of a then-famous game show that has long ago left the air) which has yet to see much trickle-down from Virgin’s use of the area, even as the town’s mayor assumes that the town will get more business once Virgin’s commercial space travel service becomes fully operational.
Personally, I would think that a real laissez-faire policy wouldn’t punish businesses and rich people just for being rich, but neither should it give them unearned rewards when they already have natural advantages and the resources to develop their companies without government help.
It’s not that there aren’t infrastructure and other projects that need a government to execute, and it’s not as though those shouldn’t be under a public authority as opposed to an individual, otherwise Elon Musk could just buy I-95, call it private property and then charge a subscription fee to drive on it. But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.
If you want to avoid that state of affairs and actually have an activist government, you need to get involved and be an active watchdog on that government. Billionaires or no billionaires (which is what most socialists want), you’re not going to have that activist government unless you consider that the Democratic Party is failing to apply even the technical majority in the Senate that they currently have, and maybe you should start investigating exactly why that is.
Not like any of these billionaires need me to defend them, and not like they’re really going to be hurting if we rolled back most of the Trump-Ryan tax laws. But if you really think we can solve all our problems by soaking the rich, first you’re going to have to convince me that government at all levels is not lazier and piggier than any zillionaire in this week’s Two Minutes Hate. And when the government includes people like Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert, that’s gonna be pretty hard.