Comments Elsewhere

Several of the respondents to Mr. Mackey’s article could benefit from a better understanding of politics and economics.

There is, for example, “Bubba Roby,” who apparently thinks that columns by Lew Rockwell (a capitalist libertarian who runs the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, and the web site www.lewrockwell.com) frequently appear on the DNC website, and that Democrats often make arguments based on bashing John F. Kennedy’s government spending; or Matt McCay, who apparently thinks that the Tenth Amendment is a bunch of “liberal crap” (it is a “liberal” amendment, I suppose, in the sense that George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, etc. were all “liberals”—that is, it comes directly out of the classical liberal tradition of liberty and limited government—a tradition which both Right-wing conservatives and welfare state “liberals” discard today.)

There are also the arguments by Tommy Gibb, Space Cowboy, and others that funding space exploration through tax dollars and government bureaucracy has led to great innovation. Of course, the space program has led to great innovation (although some of the claims—such as Mr. Gibb’s claim that electronic computers, which were invented in the mid-1940s, were due to the American space program, which was initiated in 1958—cannot be taken entirely seriously). But a more fundamental point needs to be made: as Frederic Bastiat pointed out in his essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen,” government expenditures are frequently defended by the following specious logic: of course, when the government takes billions of dollars from group A and gives them to group B, group B (in this case, NASA) is probably going to be able to do some worthwhile things with it. But what is NOT seen are the hidden costs of the transfer: all of the things that group A could have done with the money if it had not been taken from them. Think of how many technological advancements would have been possible if those billions of dollars were not taken for NASA, but rather freely spent and invested in technological efforts where success is determined by market efficiencies rather than bureaucratic say-so. Would that have produced a greater level of technological achievement and a better quality of life than the government transfer program? Well, of course we don’t know for sure — the redistribution prevents us from ever finding out. But history and economics certainly furnish us with plenty of reasons to think that markets are efficient and responsive to the needs of the people participating in them; it furnishes us with very few reasons to think the same of government bureaucracies.

One special case of this sort of specious reasoning is the Keynsian fallacy endorsed by “Space Cowboy,” who claims that taking massive amounts of money to spend on NASA will actually grow the economy “Oh, the waste! All that cash…billions…to be deposited on the face of Mars. Actually, it’ll all be spent here on Earth…mortgage payments, college tuition, investments in communities…but, I digress…” Of course, it is true that the money will be spent on Earth (that is why it is called transferring money rather than burning it up). But the mere fact that money is moving around does not mean any sort of real economic growth. (Imagine a government program in which billions and billions of dollars were taken from individuals in order to fund a vast make-work program in which people make mud-pies for $100/hr. Of course, there would be tremendous amounts of money moving around in the economy as a result of this transfer—and mud-pie makers would have lots of money to spend on cars, houses, college, etc. But the people from whom the money was taken could have used it for all of those tasks without the government taking the money and giving it to the mud-pie makers. And the mud-pie makers will have spent their time making a huge pile of mud-pies rather than working for firms on the market that produce things that consumers want. In the end, then, billions of dollars have been moved around, and untold man-hours have been used that can never be gotten back, and all for what? A big pile of mud-pies. Suffice it to say that this doesn’t strike me as the best way to go about growing wealth in a society.

Charles Johnson
cwj2@eskimo.com
Freelance Academic, Auburn alumnus
http://radgeek.com/