Well, ask, and ye shall receive.

I don’t have a lot of time to post, but I want to welcome Jim McDade. He brings a different (should I say more traditional?) space policy viewpoint to Transterrestrial, and I suspect that some intrablog sparring will liven up the discussion here. While I agree with him that a Kerry presidency shows no signs of boding well for our future in space, there are a number of other things with which I would take issue, particularly in his follow-up comments (particularly his trotting out of the old “broken window” fallacy). Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do so right now, because, as I said, I’m busy househunting in Florida, so I’ll let others discuss it for now.

I also hope that Jim (and Andrew) will put up a brief description of who they are, for the edification of the readership.

[Update around noon eastern time]

Jim responds in comments on breaking windows. My response:

With respect to boosting economies post hurricanes, no one disputes that it benefits the local economies of the people whose communities get rebuilt. The problem is that they’re not the ones who pay the opportunity costs–the taxpayers are. It’s easy to make things boom locally by taxing others globally (just as it’s easy to decrease entropy locally, at a greater cost in the rest of the universe). It’s also easy to boost a bank robber’s income by letting him rob banks. That doesn’t mean that turning everyone into bank robbers will increase the national wealth.

The point is not that we shouldn’t help people out after hurricanes and that it’s a benefit to them when we do so, but rather that we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this is in any way a good thing for the national economy, and that we should therefore wish for hurricanes.

Space programs have to be justified by their benefits to society as a whole, not by how much they benefit communities with NASA centers, at the expense of the taxpayers. If we make bad and easily refuted arguments in support of space expansion, it can be worse than making no arguments at all.