Some thoughts on central planning.
Confusing cost, price and value is a continuous problem in the government space program.
5 thoughts on “Trading Value For Power”
Comments are closed.
Some thoughts on central planning.
Confusing cost, price and value is a continuous problem in the government space program.
Comments are closed.
Confusing cost, price and value is a continuous problem in the government.
FIFY
One of the best explanations of the problem with socialism that I’ve seen.
Rand, do you really recognize central planning when you see it, or is it sometimes so close to you that you take some forms of it for granted? You go from in this post stating your opposition to central planning to engaging in your next post about space a classic piece of speculative central planning:
If we establish logistics nodes at the Lagrange points for departures and returns from deep space, the moon will look ever more compelling.
Who is “we”? What customers are to be served by this Lagrange point infrastructure? How are they paying for this service and what value do they actually get out of it? Where did you get the power of prophecy to predict all this?
Yes, I recognize central planning when I see it, and I do take NASA for granted, because I don’t see it going away any time soon. I’m just trying to improve the plan.
That’s what anybody with their own pet portion of the federal budget can and often does argue — the government is already spending the money, we are simply taking that for granted and arguing that they should spend it better. Even if they are otherwise libertarian, they end up sounding like they favor the spending since they spend so much time arguing about how to spend the money instead of arguing about how to cut it.
Besides “space libertarians” who take the NASA budget for granted, we could have (and often do have) “green libertarians” who spend much time talk about stronger environmental regulations, “neolibertarians” who put much or most of their efforts into talking about the need for a stronger military, “compassionate libertarians” who wants to cut the other parts of government but end up spending most of their time talking about how they see making welfare payments more effective, “lobbyist libertarians” who favor the free market except when they can screw their customer’s competitors with regulations, which is what they end up spending most of their time doing, and so on.
A thousand activist groups each with its own “insignificant” few billions of the federal budget that they “take for granted” and pretty soon we are talking about the entire federal budget. The result would be (or is) what we see today — politicians keep seeing committed activists who seem to love the spending and the regulations and don’t see the silent majority of people who quietly resent all the other kinds of spending. The only area which they care enough about to write their Congressmen is their pet area, so the politicians primarily see letters that seem to be or are pro-spending even if the writers are otherwise libertarian. It’s straightforward public choice — the focused interests win and the dispersed interests lose.