Moon Shot helped blow out the U.S. economy

When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, I was enthralled by the Space Program, especially the Moon Shot, whose 40th anniversary is being celebrated. I read numerous books on space exploration, watched all the launches on TV, and even once cut Saturday catechism class to watch a Gemini launch.

But a lot has happened since then, including the ongoing bankruptcy of America. A few thoughts:

Regime uncertainty

Robert Higgs has come up with a useful concept: “regime uncertainty.” Is the government a) helping businesses grow and create jobs by keeping the currency stable and reducing taxes and regulations; then the regime is certain and stable.

Or is the government b) hammering businesses with inflation and wild new spending coupled with new taxes and regulations. Then there is “regime uncertainty. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next, so economic planning and investment are difficult, sometimes impossible.

LBJ’s wild spending

So let’s look at the last 45 years:

After LBJ’s 1964 landslide, he and the Democratic Congress did b), greatly increasing “regime uncertainty.” They went on a spending binge on his Great Society socialist schemes. The cost of them, over the years, has been immense — tens of trillions of dollars.

In 1965, he escalated the Vietnam War, eventually putting 550,000 troops in Nam. The total cost of the war (1965-1973) was $100 billion then, about $3 trillion today factoring inflation and population growth — about the same cost of the Iraq War (so far).

And he (and JFK and Nixon) wasted $10 billion on the Moon Shot, about $300 billion in today’s money.

With the federal budget buckling, in 1968 LBJ pushed through a 10% income tax surtax that brought on a recession. He and the Fed also began inflating the currency — the usual government tactic of cheating people by paying them with money actually worth less than what’s written on the bills.

Nixon’s the One!

The recession, Nam, Great Society welfarism, riots, and the whole mess of 1968 brought us Nixon. If he had had any sense, he would have demanded that Congress make the Vietnam War legit by declaring war; Congress would not have done so, so he could have ended it posthaste, saving about half the final cost in lives (58,000 Americans dead, 3.2 million Viets dead) and treasure. He didn’t. He should have fought LBJ’s Great Society. He didn’t, instead funding and expanding it (for example, with affirmative action).

And Nixon should have ended the inflation by returning to a rock-solid gold standard at $35 an ounce. Instead, in 1971 as part of his New Economic Policy (same name as Lenin’s), he took us off gold for the first time under the Constitution (except for Lincoln’s greenbacks), sparking the inflation that has plagued us ever since. He also increased taxes and tariffs.

The cost of the spending binge

So, add up the LBJ-Nixon spending binge, in today’s adjusted dollars: $3 trillion for Nam, $300 billion for the Moon Shot, tens of trillions for the Great Society.

Although the Moon Shot wasn’t the main part of the spending binge, it was a large part of it.

In addition in 1972 Congress indexed Socialist Security to the inflation rate, with Nixon’s backing. Except the index was to the cost-of-living rate, NOT to wages — a completely idiotic thing to do. The result is that at times like these in 2009, when jobs are dying and pay is stagnant, oldsters still get a cost-of-living increase in Socialist Security — 5.8% for this year.

Did you get a raise of that much? I didn’t think so. Yet you’re forced to pay for the SS increase.

1970s-2000s

The 1970s were the Malaise. In the 1980s, Reagan stabilized the dollar, cut taxes and regulations for a few years and sparked growth. Bush I was a disaster.

In the 1990s, Clinton was a disaster for his first 2 years in office, then for his next 6 years, ever slick, actually cut taxes and was not too bad on spending.

In the 2000s, Bush II panicked after 9/11, inflated the currency, spent wildly on war and domestic waste, and enacted tax cuts that will expire next year. Now we have Obama, who is continuing Bush’s disastrous policies so much he should be adopted by the Bush family and dubbed Bush III.

No wonder the system is going bankrupt.

It’s even worse now

As bad as the 70s were, it’s even worse now — because now our manufacturing base is greatly eroded and the country is much less Christian. The whole superstructure of war, deficits, debt, inflation, and wild spending is collapsing like a cheap card table. There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

My views on Darwin and evolution

Pat Buchanan has a new column up on evolution, “Making a Monkey Out of Darwin.”

My response:

Pat here in a short column ties together several things that need to be untied. First, as Pat admits, “Yet a theory can produce evil–and still be true.” And Darwinism, or at least a modest application of micro-evolution (change at or below the species level), has produced many medical breakthroughs in understanding how humans and other organisms function, and will do so even more in the future. One need only look at research into lactose intolerance (most Northern Europeans don’t have it) and malaria (most Africans and some Italians developed a resistance to it, but also a tendency to sickle-cell anemia).

Even most Fundamentalist Christians who oppose macro-evolution (at or above the level of species) accept micro-evolution.

Second, as to macro-evolution, this theory is much more complex, and I must admit that I seem to be one of the few agnostics on the matter. It is, after all, a *theory*. Maybe if the government wouldn’t tax me so much I might be able to conduct a thorough investigation.

There’s also a problem with macro-evolution advocates: As Pat said, they all, it seems (or at least the major ones we hear about), look on it as a substitute religion, instead of just a scientific theory. Richard Dawkins (an atheists who keeps his Christian first name) calls anyone who opposes him an idiot, and insists that parents who don’t accept evolution have their children taken away. Christopher Hitchens (an atheist who keep’s his Christian first name) says the same thing; although Hitchens himself isn’t a scientist, many books on evolution cite him on the blurbs on their back covers (for example, “Why Evolution Is True,” by Jerry A. Coyne).

If evolutionists were more modest and took time to explain things to the lesser breeds without the law of evolution, they might get further.

Third, as to public policy, the real reason the elites in America and Europe promote evolution is to brainwash children against their parents’ faiths — in public schools, many private and parochial schools, colleges, and universities.

Yet Christian Fundamentalists avoided the Darwinian political crimes of the Nazis and Communists that Pat notes. (Although, in practice, Stalin and his biological henchman Lysenko were Lamarckians.)

At a purely scientific level, the Fundamentalists also avoided the theory of the “multiregional” origins of humans, meaning the races evolved in different areas, which was widely believed as recently as 50 years ago by such folks as respected Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Modern genetics proves, instead, the “out of Africa” theory, that all humans have a common ancestor.

The Fundamentalists believed that all humans were offspring of Adam, and so all deserving of respect as children of God. So whatever the Fundies believed about science, they were right about the most important thing: that there are just men, not sub-humans and uebermenschen. (Unfortunately, nowadays the Fundies are obsessed with America invading the Middle East to incite God to Armageddon, thus getting them raptured from their cars.)

Finally, the real battle for those of us on the Right is not to bring “creationism” into the public schools, but to abolish the public schools and to end or reduce tax funding of all colleges and universities, which nowadays are anti-intellectual citadels of intolerance.

If Darwinians really believe their theories are superior, they should be the first to reject the crutch of coerced tax subsidies.

Privatization of all education would mean educational Darwinism: competing theories battling it out in the classroom, with parents, with students, and in the marketplace of ideas. Let the fittest theories survive.

Evolution “speeding up”? Rather it’s reversing

Historian Henry Adams remarked in his autobiography, “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence to upset Darwin.”

Were Adams around today, he would note the further regression to President Bush. From George Washington to George Bush is a reversal greater than if humans had become chimps.

Despite that, famed anthropologist Henry Harpending has new research out showing that evolution supposedly is speeding up. I just don’t see it. Also consider the first U.S. Congress, which included James Madison, devolving to the current Congress of Pelosi, Hillary, Kyl, McCain, etc.

Harpending needs to go back and re-examine his fossils.

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Surfing explains everything

When I moved out to California 20 years ago, my surfer friends told me that “Surfing explains everything.” Growing up in Michigan, about all I knew about surfing I learned from Beach Boys songs. So I didn’t get it.

It turns out the surfers were right. A surfer dude has come up with a new Theory of the Universe (the material part of it, anyway).

Garrett Lisi’s theory…

does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year….

“Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi’s theory,” adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. “This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound.”

Click on the article link for more of the explanation.

Or check out these Beach Boys lyrics, which explained everything 45 years ago:

It’s a genuine fact that the Surfers rule
It’s plastered on the walls all around the school now
(Surfers rule, Surfers rule)
Becoming just as common as a golden rule now
(Surfers rule, Surfers rule)
Take it or leave it but you better believe it
Surfers rule

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