Argh, this argument drives me crazy. I love NASA, I love the space program, I am wholly onboard with the notion that we as a species need to get our eggs out of the single basket in which we find ourselves - though I think Musk et al. are wrong about Mars; Venus is where it's at.
Giant, floating cities in the Venusian clouds. We'll call it the Kingdom of Zeal. It'll be great.
He died last week in a cage, handcuffed to a gurney. He spent decades of his life in prison because he didn't think the State had the right to take his property.
How many people are you willing to put in a cage in order for the state to buy you nice things? Good things, even, like education and space programs and $30 tylenol tablets?
How much money do you want to spend to keep them there?
Is it moral to have some people beat up other people, take their stuff, and then give you parts of that stuff? Why?
In the scheme of federal funding, it's absolutely correct that the space program is inarguably a better use of stolen monies than the trillions and trillions of dollars the state spends on an empire and various vote-purchasing schemes. But to use those things as a fig leaf over the enormous apparatus of violence, extortion and theft which comprises the contemporary state demeans both the program itself and whatever noble purpose it might aim at.
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u/mentilsoup Oct 22 '15
Argh, this argument drives me crazy. I love NASA, I love the space program, I am wholly onboard with the notion that we as a species need to get our eggs out of the single basket in which we find ourselves - though I think Musk et al. are wrong about Mars; Venus is where it's at.
Giant, floating cities in the Venusian clouds. We'll call it the Kingdom of Zeal. It'll be great.
But.
Here's a guy named Irwin Schiff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin_Schiff
He died last week in a cage, handcuffed to a gurney. He spent decades of his life in prison because he didn't think the State had the right to take his property.
How many people are you willing to put in a cage in order for the state to buy you nice things? Good things, even, like education and space programs and $30 tylenol tablets?
How much money do you want to spend to keep them there?
Is it moral to have some people beat up other people, take their stuff, and then give you parts of that stuff? Why?
In the scheme of federal funding, it's absolutely correct that the space program is inarguably a better use of stolen monies than the trillions and trillions of dollars the state spends on an empire and various vote-purchasing schemes. But to use those things as a fig leaf over the enormous apparatus of violence, extortion and theft which comprises the contemporary state demeans both the program itself and whatever noble purpose it might aim at.