But real space means going to other stars and you need a really, really big rocket for that. You can’t just go one step at a time on all that junk we don’t see that extends all the way to every star as we expand the economic sphere to the entire solar system.
Government has to do it for us and take care of us and feed and house and cloth us. You can’t expect people to make shoes forever.
I worked in Italy for awhile in the late 70’s and had one of these conversations with an Italian co-worker. In Italy, at least in those days, the sale of both tobacco products and matches(!) were government monopolies. You could only buy them in special stores. I casually mentioned that I thought this an odd arrangement and observed that in America matches could be bought in grocery and hardware stores and were routinely given away in bars, restaurants, hotels and other places, and that cigarettes could be bought in even more places, including from vending machines. He seemed shocked by this and simply couldn’t get his head around how such anarchy could possibly work.
Mark Whittington responded at Associated Content this morning. His objection is that space flight (or at least the trip to LEO and back) is so capital-intensive, the potential market so small, and the payoffs so far down the road, that it is more like an aircraft carrier than shoes.
This misses the point entirely. The metaphor of shoes was chosen precisely because it is something inexpensive that nearly everyone has to pay for themselves right now. The question is, what if the government had supplied shoes (or education, or health care, or mail delivery, or internet access, or rocket flights) to everyone, for some sufficiently long time period that people got used to it – could people then accept the possibility of a commercial shoe (education/health care/parcel delivery/internet/spaceflight) industry?
I think the last big attempt at government shoe seizure ended very badly at Gettysburg.
In Washington State, the state supplies all liquor except for beer and wine. For a couple election cycles now, there’s been an effort to get the state out of the liquor monopoly and open it up to retailers. People here have a hard time with the idea that someone besides state employees can sell liquor.
But real space means going to other stars and you need a really, really big rocket for that. You can’t just go one step at a time on all that junk we don’t see that extends all the way to every star as we expand the economic sphere to the entire solar system.
Government has to do it for us and take care of us and feed and house and cloth us. You can’t expect people to make shoes forever.
I worked in Italy for awhile in the late 70’s and had one of these conversations with an Italian co-worker. In Italy, at least in those days, the sale of both tobacco products and matches(!) were government monopolies. You could only buy them in special stores. I casually mentioned that I thought this an odd arrangement and observed that in America matches could be bought in grocery and hardware stores and were routinely given away in bars, restaurants, hotels and other places, and that cigarettes could be bought in even more places, including from vending machines. He seemed shocked by this and simply couldn’t get his head around how such anarchy could possibly work.
May it’s just for me but you seem to be able to read the entirety of Rothbard on Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=B65ic_7bfFEC
Mark Whittington responded at Associated Content this morning. His objection is that space flight (or at least the trip to LEO and back) is so capital-intensive, the potential market so small, and the payoffs so far down the road, that it is more like an aircraft carrier than shoes.
This misses the point entirely. The metaphor of shoes was chosen precisely because it is something inexpensive that nearly everyone has to pay for themselves right now. The question is, what if the government had supplied shoes (or education, or health care, or mail delivery, or internet access, or rocket flights) to everyone, for some sufficiently long time period that people got used to it – could people then accept the possibility of a commercial shoe (education/health care/parcel delivery/internet/spaceflight) industry?
I think the last big attempt at government shoe seizure ended very badly at Gettysburg.
In Washington State, the state supplies all liquor except for beer and wine. For a couple election cycles now, there’s been an effort to get the state out of the liquor monopoly and open it up to retailers. People here have a hard time with the idea that someone besides state employees can sell liquor.
Go figure.