Re: Wikileaks Confirms North American Union Conspiracy. Obama Signs Trucking Agreement w/ Mexico

the North American Union agenda to merge the United States, Canada
and
Mexico into a single monetary and political body is not some kooky
fringe
"conspiracy theory," but a real conspiracy
----
we should make Canada and Mexico our 51st and 52nd states

we should make them an offer they can't refuse

hell, we're already subsidizing mexico and Canada can't survive
without the USA

a simple solution to illegal immigration issues, border patrol, and a
huge increase of resources

On Jul 14, 10:19 am, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
**
>     <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/> Wikileaks
> Confirms North American Union Conspiracy. Obama Signs Trucking Agreement w/
> Mexico<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/wikileaks-confirms-...>
> *Eowyn <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/>* | July 14,
> 2011 at 5:32 am | Tags:
> Canada<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=canada>,
> conspiracy theories<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=conspiracy-theories>,
> Mexico <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=mexico>, North American
> Initiative<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=north-american-initiative>,
> Obama administratiion<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=obama-administratiion>,
> Ray LaHood <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=ray-lahood>, real
> life conspiracies<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=real-life-conspiracies>,
> RICO Act <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=rico-act>, US-Mexico
> trucking agreement<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=us-mexico-trucking-agreement>,
> Wikileaks <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=wikileaks> |
> Categories: 2012 Election<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=4934384>,
> crime <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=34945349>, Culture
> War<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=20812>,
> Economy <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=17656840>,
> Media<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=292>,
> The Powers That Be <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=499558>, United
> States <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=5850>, US
> Presidents<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=51656283>| URL:http://wp.me/pKuKY-7q4
>
> An effective way to combat an opposing group, belief, or opinion is to
> characterize it as a "conspiracy theory." That term immediately conjures in
> the mind images of tinfoil-hat wearing kooks.
>
> <http://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/tinfoilhat.jpg>But
> when we examine the dictionary definition for
> "conspiracy"<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/conspiracy>-- any secret
> agreement between two or more persons to undertake an illegal,
> wrongful, or subversive act -- then the notion that there are conspiracies
> is not so far-fetched. For that matter, the very existence of a federal law
> called RICO -- Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organiz...>--
> is an acknowledgment that conspiracies exist!
>
> The plain fact is that not all conspiracies are imaginary. There are at
> least 30 conspiracy
> theories<http://www.infowars.com/33-conspiracy-theories-that-turned-out-to-be-...>that
> turn out to be true, including the Mafia, the CIA's MK-ULTRA,
> asbestos,
> Watergate, the Tuskegee syphilis study, and the 1944 conspiracy to
> assassinate Hitler.
>
> Now, a Wikileaks <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks> document confirms
> that the North American Union agenda to merge the United States, Canada and
> Mexico into a single monetary and political body is not some kooky fringe
> "conspiracy theory," but a real conspiracy. Robert Hilz reports for Canada's
> *National Post*, June 2,
> 2011<http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/02/leaked-u-s-cable-lays-out-nor...>:
> Paul Joseph Watson reports for  June 3,
> 2011<http://www.prisonplanet.com/no-conspiracy-theory-wikileaks-cable-conf...>
> :
>
> The integration of North America's economies would best be achieved through
> an "incremental" approach, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable.
>
> The cable, released through the WikiLeaks website and apparently written
> Jan. 28, 2005, discusses some of the obstacles surrounding the merger of the
> economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico in a fashion similar to
> the European Union.
>
> "An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American
> Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian
> policymakers," the document said. "The economic payoff of the prospective
> North American initiative … is available, but its size and timing are
> unpredictable, so it should not be oversold." [...]
>
> In the cable, U.S. diplomats focused on a number of key areas to move
> forward with continental integration, including a possible common currency,
> labour markets, international trade and the borders of the three countries.
>
> The cable said Canadian economists were split on whether a fixed exchange
> rate, or a move to adopt the U.S. greenback, would benefit this country.
>
> H/t Prison Planet<http://www.prisonplanet.com/no-conspiracy-theory-wikileaks-cable-conf...>
>
> <http://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/0706-trucking-us...>
>
> Photo credit: Christian Science Monitor
>
> The North American Union conspiracy is proceeding according to plan. A week
> ago, the United States and Mexico signed an agreement allowing trucks from
> each nation to travel on the other country's highways – a key provision of
> NAFTA.
>
> Howard LaFranchi reports for *The Christian Science
> Monitor*<http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2011/0706/Landmark-US-Mex...>,
> July 6, 2011, that under the agreement, the US will reinstate a pilot
> program for Mexican truck certification that was introduced under the Bush
> administration – and defunded by an angry Congress in 2009. Mexico, in turn,
> will immediately drop half of the tariffs on about 100 US products, with the
> rest to be removed when Mexican trucks actually start rolling across the
> border. The accord requires all Mexican trucks operating in the US to comply
> with US safety standards, and it mandates the installation of monitoring
> devices to track truck usage and compliance with service requirements.
>
> The Obama administration's US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood
> <http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Ray+LaHood>signed the agreement
> despite fears of unsafe Mexican trucks barreling along US highways, driven
> by unprofessional Mexican truckers, and in spite of growing resistance,
> especially in the US
> Congress<http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/U.S.+Congress>,
> to free-trade provisions with Mexico.
>
> H/t beloved fellow Tina.
>
> *~Eowyn*
>
> Add a comment to this
> post<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/wikileaks-confirms-...>
>
>   [image: WordPress]
>
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Re: Was the Space Shuttle Worth It?

the cost of the program would have been worth it had our government
NOT given the technology away to other nations without a price

who funded the program?
and who should have reaped the rewards from the r&d?

On Jul 14, 11:23 am, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> Was the Space Shuttle Worth It?Wednesday, July 13, 2011
> byTimothy D. Terrell
> The final flight of the space-shuttle program, in progress as this is written, has prompted a number of retrospectives on the program's costs and benefits. Saturday'sWall Street Journalreportedthat the price tag on the US space-shuttle program has been difficult to pin down. One NASA estimate on the low end, because it does not account for inflation is $115.5 billion, or around $860 million per launch. That's still far higher than NASA's original projection of $7 million per launch, predicated as it was on far more frequent launches. Two more recent estimates are $193 billion (in 2010 dollars) and $211 billion. For the program's 135 launches, that's $1.43 billion and $1.56 billion per launch, respectively.
> Economists will find still other problems with these per-launch cost estimates. Whether the average cost per launch is $0.86 billion or $1.56 billion, those are stillaveragecosts, and not marginal costs. The additional costs of any particular shuttle launch could have been larger or smaller than the average, and were likely to have been smaller. Some significant portion of the shuttle program's costs weresunkcosts, meaning that the costs of developing the shuttle were up-front, irrecoverable costs and therefore irrelevant to the decision to launch a particular mission. Marginal costs would have included the cost of preparing an existing shuttle for a mission, the fuel, the astronaut training and other scientist training specific to that mission, the equipment to be deposited in orbit by the mission, and similar costs.
> But there is another sort of calculation problem that faces government-funded science, beyond the questions of average versus marginal costs, or whether or not to count inflation, or whether or not a particular expense is shuttle-related. This calculation problem afflicts every form of government spending: What is the opportunity cost of the government's spending? All those resources used for the shuttle program had to come from somewhere. As Ludwig von Misespointed outas early as 1920, it is impossible for a government that is dispensing with the market process to make the vital calculations of costs and benefits that would be necessary to make efficient resource allocations for society.
> An individual or a business operating in a market system has to consider the potential alternative uses of resources employed in any particular action. Prices of labor, capital, and raw materials provide a way to compare the costs of the different methods of producing any given good, and consideration of profits or losses give the entrepreneur critical information about whether or not the product is as desirable as other things that could be produced with the same resources. While a government agency such as NASA typically does have to purchase resources such as a technician's labor or a shuttle part from the private sector, it is operating without the information provided with profit and loss. Is a shuttle mission a better use of the resources than any alternative? We can't know, because a shuttle mission is not sold at a market-determined price to a willing buyer. NASA did not have to consider whether $200 billion dollars forcibly extracted from taxpayers would produce something salable at a price of more than $200 billion.
> We can make some comparison with other providers of similar services. The Russian "Progress" vehicle currently appears to be the cost leader, with a cost per pound to the International Space Station (ISS) of $18,149. The private sector is gaining, though sometimes only as subcontractors to the government, and not without a fight even there. In May of this year, in House hearings on commercial cargo supply to the ISS, a subcommittee report compared the private-sector alternative unfavorably to the space shuttle ($26,770 vs. $21,268 per pound to the ISS).But some observers noted the subcommittee's "fudging" of the numbers to favor the shuttle program.Robert Zimmerman pointed outthat the numbers were based on an annual cost of $3 billion to operate the shuttle, when in fact $4 billion per year is more reasonable (though still low). According to Zimmerman, "the shuttle operational budget has never,everbeen that low." Using the more reasonable figure puts the shuttle per-pound cost at $28,357, higher than the $26,770 private contractor's cost. Furthermore, as Zimmerman notes, the numbers do not take into account the fact that private companies are likely to lower their costs as their technology becomes less experimental, and as they enjoy greater economies of scale. The space shuttle, however, was not going to get any cheaper.
> But even with competition from other governments, and even with NASA subcontracting to the private sector, the calculation problem remains. What was and is still being given up in order to build and maintain the ISS? What has been the opportunity cost of the various exploratory and research missions funded by the government? Without profit and loss, government space flight is unable to provide a credible economic justification for its own existence.
> The problem of unknowable opportunity costs puts a dent in the idea that government science programs create a "multiplier" that generates more than their cost in private-sector advancements. The research, new technologies, and discoveries that might have been products of the space-shuttle program exist in the shadow of other research, technologies, and discoveries that might have been produced with the resources had they remained in the private sector. Any NASA "multiplier" exists because a private-sector multiplier has been destroyed. There is, asFrederic Bastiatwould say, "what is seen and what is unseen." Tim Swansonput it this way:In the end, regardless of what the state did or did not fund or invent, the take-away principle is the unseen. While everyone with a TV has been able to see the hordes of chemical rockets dramatically blast into the cosmos over the past decades, they were similarly unable to see the productive opportunities foregone and ignored via the reallocation of scarce resources.The perceived benefits of a vain, nationalized space program include, among others, the fallacious need to fight themythical shortageof scientists and engineers. Whereas in reality, it has stymied private tourism, exploration, and research for nearly half a century.In fact, there is reason to doubt that the technologies said to originate in the shuttle program and other parts of the space program are really the results of government "investment." As William L. Andersonhas noted, "we have no evidence that the space program has created on its own any of the new technologies that make our material lives better; instead, the program has utilized existing technologies."
> Sadly, the memorable theatrical displays NASA has produced over the years have distracted from the true costs of government enterprises. We are tempted to regard the federal government's space program as a bright symbol of American greatness, when in fact it has been a hindrance to American ingenuity and prosperity.Timothy Terrellis associate professor of economics at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.http://mises.org/daily/5454/Was-the-Space-Shuttle-Worth-Itu

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Leviathan’s Lies

Leviathan's Lies
Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics, John J. Mearsheimer, Oxford University Press, 160 pages
By James Bovard | July 14, 2011

Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer's patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn't matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery.

This new book by John Mearsheimer, coauthor of the courageous masterpiece The Israel Lobby, is a step toward remedying the academy and media's disregard of political perfidy.  Mearsheimer "concentrates on lies that are told in the service of the national interest. These strategic lies benefit the collectivity, unlike selfish lies, which benefit a particular individual or group of individuals." He explains that "strategic lies can do good things for a country, although there is always the possibility that they will do more harm than good." On the book's own evidence, there's more than a possibility.

Why Leaders Lie deals solely with foreign policy lies. Mearsheimer analyzes five different types: inter-state lies (to delude foreign governments), fearmongering (deceiving the citizenry by exaggerating a foreign threat), strategic cover-ups (such as denying military and other debacles), nationalist myths (dissimulating about the nation's sordid past), and "liberal lies" (such as denials about targeting foreign civilians).

Mearsheimer touts President Kennedy's deceits regarding the Cuban missile crisis as an example of a successful strategic lie. In a secret deal with Khruschev, JFK agreed to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey to sway the Soviets to remove their missiles from Cuba. JFK vehemently denied that any such deal was made at the time, and the agreement was kept secret for 30 years.

But the lies had repercussions. The apparent U.S. triumph in the Cuban missile standoff sanctified JFK and increased the arrogance of the Best and the Brightest.  The successful con on Cuba probably spurred more brazen lying by the Kennedy administration on Vietnam­with disastrous results for the United States.

Mearsheimer discovers that while national governments lie to each other much less often than readers might presume, rulers are far more likely to deceive their own people. This is especially troublesome because democracy is far more effective at breeding gullibility than at leashing politicians. Lord Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth, observed in 1921 that "State action became less distrusted the more the State itself was seen to be passing under popular control." The rise of democracy has enabled politicians to convince citizens that government poses no threat because they control its actions­or so the myth goes.

While some people regard political lies as negligible offenses, official deceits often prove fatal to foreigners. Mearsheimer quotes recent research concluding that "democracies are somewhat more likely than non-democracies to target [foreign] civilians" during wars. Why Leaders Lie examines the British government's brazen falsehoods about the intentional slaughter of German civilians in RAF bombing raids during World War II. "The British government did not want to tell its public that it was purposely killing civilians, because this was a gross violation of the laws of war."

Similarly, President Harry Truman told Americans in August 1945 that "the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians." But Hiroshima was actually a major city with more than a third of a million people prior to its incineration.

In recent times, the American media and Congress brushed aside almost all concerns about the slaughter of innocent people in Fallujah. Any cheery statement by a Pentagon spokesman was sufficient to prove that the U.S. military was blameless, regardless of how many Iraqi women and children were killed.

The lies of conniving politicians are compounded by kowtowing experts. In Washington, power is the highest truth. Credibility depends on titles, not veracity. Blind deference to authority might be expected from semi-literate peasants in some mountain hollow. But it is more of a problem coming from the academic elite and establishment heavyweights. Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council for Foreign Relations, admitted: "My initial support for the [Iraq] war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility." As Daniel Ellsberg declared in 1970, the Pentagon Papers provided thousands of pages documenting "twenty years of crime under four presidents. And every one of those presidents had a Harvard professor at his side, telling him how to do it and how to get away with it."

Much of the mainstream media has long been happy to partner with Washington in deceiving the American people. Flora Lewis, a New York Times columnist, writing three weeks before 9/11, commented in a review of a book on U.S. government lies about the Vietnam War: "There will probably never be a return to the discretion, really collusion, with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well." But within months of her comment, the media was as craven as ever. The Washington Post and the New York Times made it easy for Bush to con the nation into an unnecessary war against Arabs.

Mearsheimer deftly recounts some of the premier Bush administration lies paving the way to attacking Iraq. The administration was staffed with whiz kids whose philosophical training persuaded them to rise above mere facts. Many of the most prominent advocates of the Iraq War, such as Paul Wolfowitz, were devotees of Leo Strauss, renowned as a "philosopher of the noble lie"­on the assumption that truth is only for the elite.

One of the primary sources of misinformation that spurred the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a newly created Pentagon policy shop called the Office of Special Plans. Its director, Abram Shulsky­who received his doctorate under Strauss­co-wrote a 1999 essay that declared that Strauss "alerts one to the possibility that … deception is the norm in political life." Professor Shadia Drury, author of Leo Strauss and the American Right, notes that Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right­'the right of the superior to rule over the inferior'."

Politicians get away with lies in part because Americans are taught that anyone who disbelieves the government must be crazy­the same view the KGB took of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s. This prejudice was canonized in the work of former communist and Ivy League professor Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Top-ranking government officials exploited that notion to help deceive Americans into submission. At the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara declared that it is "inconceivable that anyone even remotely familiar with our society and system of government could suspect the existence of a conspiracy" to take the nation to war on false pretenses.

(After his retirement, McNamara joined the Washington Post's board of directors. So much for telling "truth to power.")

Lies subvert democracy by crippling citizens' ability to rein in government. Citizens are left clueless about perils until it is too late for the nation to pull back. As Hannah Arendt noted, during the Vietnam War "the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress." CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But "in the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public," she observed.

Unfortunately, Why Leaders Lie does not provide a clear standard for judging official deceit. Should we presume that "good government" is when politicians lie to the people for the public benefit and "bad government" is when politicians lie for selfish interests? How can we distinguish between the two? We have to trust politicians to tell us which is which. According to Mearsheimer, if a leader is not lying about foreign policy for "selfish purposes" (such as "their own personal interests or those of their friends"), then he may deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Political lies are far more dangerous than most political scientists recognize. Big government requires Big Lies­and not just about wars but across the board. The more powerful centralized administration becomes the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell. The government becomes addicted to the growth of its own revenue and power­and this growth cannot be maintained without denying or suppressing the adverse effects of Leviathan's growth.

The more power government seizes, the more easily it can suppress the truth. The Obama administration's aggressive use of the "state secrets" doctrine to cover up the U.S. government's involvement in torture and other high crimes is typical of how the game is played in Washington. WikiLeaks has proven that U.S. foreign policy is far more dishonest than was commonly believed. Unfortunately, Americans have no legal way to commandeer government files until long after most power grabs are consummated.

Even so, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were re-elected long after their chicaneries became obvious to attentive observers. But if people are content to be deceived, elections become little more than patients choosing which nurses will inject their sedatives. If the citizenry does not punish liars, then it cannot expect the truth. And the more arbitrary power the U.S. presidency possesses, the more it attracts the type of politician who will not hesitate to lie to capture office.

There is no reason to expect government to be more honest in the future than it has been in the past. The Obama administration's lies on Libya are eerily akin to the Bush team's lies on Iraq and the Clinton administration's lies on Kosovo. But deceiving the American people should no longer be treated as a victimless crime. Why Leaders Lie is a potent reminder of the perils of letting politicians rule by deceit.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/leviathans-lies/

Thinking Vertically

Thinking Vertically
by Richard Schwartzman, July 14, 2011

The reaction to the Casey Anthony trial in Florida is just more proof of how ignorant so many Americans are about rights, laws, and liberty.

Everyone from TV hosts -- who should know better -- to radio sports talk-show hosts (yes, really) to the normal gang at the coffee shop, all are appalled at a jury who failed to convict the accused of killing her daughter. People who weren't anywhere near the courtroom "know" that she did it and should pay with her own life.

So much for what people know or think they know. The reaction reflects a total disregard for due process. One of the coffeehouse regulars said she wishes our court system followed a model where a person is presumed guilty until he or she proves their innocence. What's really scary is that this woman used to work for a law firm.

This is the same person who has been looking for ways to extend her unemployment, says her taxes are too high, loves Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and wants the government to take care of her like European governments take care of their citizens.

One must wonder where things went wrong.

Some of us were fortunate enough to have a teacher or two who actually respected the Founding Fathers and what they created with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights and the uniqueness of the United States with the idea that a person must be considered innocent until proven guilty.

That last follows naturally from the rule of logic that the burden of proof is on the person making the positive assertion. Philosophically, that's how it must be. Without the simple concept that presumes innocence, there can be no liberty. The government would treat us all as suspected criminals -- as if that weren't already the case. (Think TSA; think gun control.)

But, the education system began breaking down. Logic was replaced by emotion and truth became inconvenient. Some of us experienced the change, even if we were too young to realize what was going on.

The model of politics that's been taught for generations is based on a half-truth, a lie of omission. It's the bipolar notion that the political spectrum is a single, horizontal line that looks more like the flat line of a dead person's EEG than a properly functioning society.

In the fifth grade I was taught that the far left on that line represented the communists. "They're bad," the teacher said. The far right represented the Nazis. "They were bad," the teacher said again, adding, "We're good because we're in the middle."

Even at that age I knew there was something wrong with that last part.

I was too young to translate my thoughts into words and I just didn't know what was wrong until I started reading Orwell, Machiavelli, Rand, and Heinlein. But it wasn't until seeing the World's Smallest Political Quiz with the Nolan Chart that I got the visual image of the right way to show the political map. There's a vertical axis representing the difference between authoritarians (statists) and libertarians.

Yet from schools, to the popular media to politicians, all that's presented to people is that flat, bipolar, horizontal line.

Libertarians stay aware of the vertical. We think vertically, about the difference between people owning their own lives or having the government owning them. That's a fundamental difference between libertarians and big-government types.

As a member of the media I tend to blame the media, particularly television, for focusing solely on the horizontal with little to no regard or respect for the fact that government force is government force whether it comes from the left or the right.

Perhaps liberty hasn't been considered sexy enough for TV coverage. That's changing, though. Two shows, Freedom Watch and Stossel, both on Fox Business Channel, do speak libertarian and speak it quite well.

Maybe it's only two, but it's two more than we used to have. That's positive and other people are beginning to see the vertical line. It's a small group, and the line is still faint to many. Most likely still don't fully grasp what they're seeing, but it's still a move in the right direction.

The only real truth to the left/right paradigm is that it reflects a bipolar society, a society that swings between warfare and welfare, between the neo-cons and progressives who have increased the national debt to more than $14.3 trillion, putting even newborns in debt to the tune of $46,000 for each. That will continue until more people begin thinking vertically.

Perhaps Casey Anthony actually committed the offense with which she was charged, but the state failed to make its case beyond a reasonable doubt and because of that failure, the jury property did its duty by acquitting her. Just as there can be no peace without liberty, there can be no liberty without the presumption of innocence.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com1107l.asp

Was the Space Shuttle Worth It?

Was the Space Shuttle Worth It?
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
by Timothy D. Terrell

The final flight of the space-shuttle program, in progress as this is written, has prompted a number of retrospectives on the program's costs and benefits. Saturday's Wall Street Journal reported that the price tag on the US space-shuttle program has been difficult to pin down. One NASA estimate ­ on the low end, because it does not account for inflation ­ is $115.5 billion, or around $860 million per launch. That's still far higher than NASA's original projection of $7 million per launch, predicated as it was on far more frequent launches. Two more recent estimates are $193 billion (in 2010 dollars) and $211 billion. For the program's 135 launches, that's $1.43 billion and $1.56 billion per launch, respectively.

Economists will find still other problems with these per-launch cost estimates. Whether the average cost per launch is $0.86 billion or $1.56 billion, those are still average costs, and not marginal costs. The additional costs of any particular shuttle launch could have been larger or smaller than the average, and were likely to have been smaller. Some significant portion of the shuttle program's costs were sunk costs, meaning that the costs of developing the shuttle were up-front, irrecoverable costs and therefore irrelevant to the decision to launch a particular mission. Marginal costs would have included the cost of preparing an existing shuttle for a mission, the fuel, the astronaut training and other scientist training specific to that mission, the equipment to be deposited in orbit by the mission, and similar costs.

But there is another sort of calculation problem that faces government-funded science, beyond the questions of average versus marginal costs, or whether or not to count inflation, or whether or not a particular expense is shuttle-related. This calculation problem afflicts every form of government spending: What is the opportunity cost of the government's spending? All those resources used for the shuttle program had to come from somewhere. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out as early as 1920, it is impossible for a government that is dispensing with the market process to make the vital calculations of costs and benefits that would be necessary to make efficient resource allocations for society.

An individual or a business operating in a market system has to consider the potential alternative uses of resources employed in any particular action. Prices of labor, capital, and raw materials provide a way to compare the costs of the different methods of producing any given good, and consideration of profits or losses give the entrepreneur critical information about whether or not the product is as desirable as other things that could be produced with the same resources. While a government agency such as NASA typically does have to purchase resources such as a technician's labor or a shuttle part from the private sector, it is operating without the information provided with profit and loss. Is a shuttle mission a better use of the resources than any alternative? We can't know, because a shuttle mission is not sold at a market-determined price to a willing buyer. NASA did not have to consider whether $200 billion dollars forcibly extracted from taxpayers would produce something salable at a price of more than $200 billion.

We can make some comparison with other providers of similar services. The Russian "Progress" vehicle currently appears to be the cost leader, with a cost per pound to the International Space Station (ISS) of $18,149. The private sector is gaining, though sometimes only as subcontractors to the government, and not without a fight even there. In May of this year, in House hearings on commercial cargo supply to the ISS, a subcommittee report compared the private-sector alternative unfavorably to the space shuttle ($26,770 vs. $21,268 per pound to the ISS). But some observers noted the subcommittee's "fudging" of the numbers to favor the shuttle program. Robert Zimmerman pointed out that the numbers were based on an annual cost of $3 billion to operate the shuttle, when in fact $4 billion per year is more reasonable (though still low). According to Zimmerman, "the shuttle operational budget has never, ever been that low." Using the more reasonable figure puts the shuttle per-pound cost at $28,357, higher than the $26,770 private contractor's cost. Furthermore, as Zimmerman notes, the numbers do not take into account the fact that private companies are likely to lower their costs as their technology becomes less experimental, and as they enjoy greater economies of scale. The space shuttle, however, was not going to get any cheaper.

But even with competition from other governments, and even with NASA subcontracting to the private sector, the calculation problem remains. What was and is still being given up in order to build and maintain the ISS? What has been the opportunity cost of the various exploratory and research missions funded by the government? Without profit and loss, government space flight is unable to provide a credible economic justification for its own existence.

The problem of unknowable opportunity costs puts a dent in the idea that government science programs create a "multiplier" that generates more than their cost in private-sector advancements. The research, new technologies, and discoveries that might have been products of the space-shuttle program exist in the shadow of other research, technologies, and discoveries that might have been produced with the resources had they remained in the private sector. Any NASA "multiplier" exists because a private-sector multiplier has been destroyed. There is, as Frederic Bastiat would say, "what is seen and what is unseen." Tim Swanson put it this way:

In the end, regardless of what the state did or did not fund or invent, the take-away principle is the unseen. While everyone with a TV has been able to see the hordes of chemical rockets dramatically blast into the cosmos over the past decades, they were similarly unable to see the productive opportunities foregone and ignored via the reallocation of scarce resources.

The perceived benefits of a vain, nationalized space program include, among others, the fallacious need to fight the mythical shortage of scientists and engineers. Whereas in reality, it has stymied private tourism, exploration, and research for nearly half a century.

In fact, there is reason to doubt that the technologies said to originate in the shuttle program and other parts of the space program are really the results of government "investment." As William L. Anderson has noted, "we have no evidence that the space program has created on its own any of the new technologies that make our material lives better; instead, the program has utilized existing technologies."

Sadly, the memorable theatrical displays NASA has produced over the years have distracted from the true costs of government enterprises. We are tempted to regard the federal government's space program as a bright symbol of American greatness, when in fact it has been a hindrance to American ingenuity and prosperity.

Timothy Terrell is associate professor of economics at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

http://mises.org/daily/5454/Was-the-Space-Shuttle-Worth-Itu