Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
By 1963, before we had The Great Society, before we had Civil Rights, before we had a Department of Education, feminism, no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, unlimited immigration, the EPA, Clean Water Act, public employee unions the prevailing wage and transgender bathrooms, Americans had built Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building, won a world war, rebuilt Europe and the Far East, started the interstate highway system and were on the way to putting a man on the moon not just once, but several times. The United States was a great nation.
Could any of that happen today?
If not, what would need to change in order to make it possible again?
Joe Doakes
Step one: put government back in the place where it belongs; defending the country and its interests, and running a court system, and not a hell of a lot more.
hell if it weren’t for the Russians we would not be able to get to the ISS
at this point most of NASA represents nothing so much as the “sciency” arm of the Democrat Party
Joe, I think you could add to the before list when we were told “You didn’t build that”.
Much of the Great Society and the New Deal are little more than pacifiers to avoid the much-feared soci@list/commie takeover. Would I take swapping my Social Security account for the Chilean system? In a heartbeat! It’s the difference between trusting idiot politicians and someone with skin in the game to manage my retirement funds. The idea of a market system with defined requirements, penalties for sub-standard performance, and a basic guaranteed backstop by the government is a good standard by which government social programs should be run. I’d argue that this type of system is not only appropriate for retirement funds, but also for health insurance (the real kind, not the health payments system we have now).
Having spent a lot of time growing up at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and having thrilled, and groaned, at the Space Shuttle and all as it played out, it strikes me that what we need in many areas is to remember that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” NASA started with a working system in the Saturn series, but to pretend that the whole thing was environmentally sound and “re-usable”, and to get Congressional votes, we ended up with a “Bulgarian goat rodeo” that ignored almost everything we’d learned in the Apollo programs.
And then we wondered why it literally blew up in our faces.
And then we wondered why it literally blew up in our faces.
Twice.
Another picture of over-design is in the “virtual border fence” proposal–it could be great if it were used, but we know very well that government bureaucrats would simply ignore it like they have other laws. Far better to have a real fence where its existence and functionality can be ascertained at a glance by a satellite in seconds. Sometimes we are just too “smart” for our own good.