Two Questions…

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…that answer themselves.

Can the US and its allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military-industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend dramatically more on defense?

Of course we can, and the path to that is in that last bit: spending more on defense (while keeping in mind that a Critical Item for defense is a strong offense) and refurbishing our military-industrial base. Convincing us average Americans to spend more on defense is simpler and more straightforward than it apparently seems to the journalist crowd. It’s necessary and simple to explain the nature and depth of the threat posed by our four primary enemies, listed in my order of risk: Russia and the People’s Republic of China tied at the top; the one as demonstrated by its active shooting war of invasion and steady threats to continue west if its current land grab is successful. The other because of its active invasion and occupation of the South China Sea, seizing territory owned by other nations around the rim of the Sea and controlling sea lines of commerce that are critical to Japan and the Republic of Korea and extremely important to us, its increasing threats to invade and conquer the Republic of China, and the cyber war it’s already inflicting on us.

In third place is Iran, with its near production of nuclear weapons, which it will use promptly to destroy Israel and then shop to its terrorist surrogates and to any others who’ll have the purchase money. This nation already shops its conventional weapons—at heavily discounted prices—to its surrogates attacking Israel and commercial shipping on the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea.

A distant fourth is northern Korea, whose rhetoric makes them worth watching carefully along with shoring up RoK’s and Japan’s defenses and our own in the northern and western Pacific, but not much more than that.

And then it’s necessary and simple, except for those politicians of both parties, to reallocate spending away from the billions of froo-froo already in the budget and toward the defense establishment. The only really hard part (and we all know what “hard” means) is getting rid of the deadwood, both civilian and in uniform, in the Pentagon and streamlining development and acquisition.

For our allies, it’s slightly more complicated (but only slightly). If they don’t want to spend more on defending themselves—especially in Europe and particularly those European NATO members who already are betraying their fellow members with their sloth—then it will be time to stand up a separate mutual defense arrangement among the US, the Three Seas Initiative nations, and Great Britain (for starters), and then walk away from NATO altogether.

And

And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?

There can be no accommodation with enemy nations whose solemn goal, often stated, is to conquer us. This is the goal of Russia and the PRC. Nor can there be an accommodation with an enemy nation whose oft-stated goal is to destroy Israel and then us. An accommodation with northern Korea is almost irrelevant, and wholly unnecessary—just do the watching and regional plussing up.

The cost of accommodating nations with those goals should be obvious—such a step would only be a step closer to their goals for those enemies. Too, that would only be the first step of a short path to our functional destruction: having accommodated our enemies once, they’ll only seek a further accommodation, and then another, then…, until we’re no longer capable of effective self defense.

Starliner and Dragon

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NASA has decided to bring Boeing’s allegedly passenger-rated capsule Starliner (so characterized by me because the thing is so robotic, its “crew” are merely passengers with extremely limited authority even to vet the robot’s decisions) back to the surface and leave the passengers it brought to the ISS on the ISS to await a flight next winter by SpaceX’s Dragon, running up there on one of SpaceX’s reusable rockets.

We’ll see if the robot, whose thrusters often malfunction (“often” in the context of rocket flight where a couple of mistakes, or even just one, kills the crew), can make it back to the surface in one piece. Oh, and remain in that one piece, undamaged, when it regains contact with that surface.

The two Boeing crewmen will remain on the ISS until February when SpaceX is scheduled to send its Dragon up with a new load of supplies for the station. That resupply mission, though, has had to be rejiggered: it will fly with only two crewmen in order to have room for the two Boeing crewmen on the ride back down.

Which gives me an idea.

SpaceX should accelerate its schedule for refurbishing and preparing for (re)launch its Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules, and get a Falcon/Dragon mission configured and ready to go by the end of September. Then petition NASA and the FAA for licensure to launch. Put the onus for quick reaction back on the government, and show Boeing how it’s done. And show the Boeing/Lockheed-Martin’s ULA how it’s done with reusable rockets.

Come to that, I challenge Elon Musk to do that. It would be more than a one-up feather in Musk’s and SpaceX’s cap, and it would be more than a demonstration of the advantages private enterprise has over quasi-private enterprise partnered with government—in which each partner has captured the other, limiting both.

No, doing so would be a demonstration of the near-emergency capability of SpaceX to get a mission launched under the tight time constraints of an in-orbit emergency.

Progressive-Democratic Party Agenda

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This is what Party has in mind, should they be the winners this fall.

Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris will push for these, among others, even as during this campaign season, she ducks away from interviews even by her friendly press (she hoped a couple weeks ago to reach an interview agreement “by the end of the month.” Keep in mind that even as she runs away from the press–and from the questions of us average Americans, these are the policies and goals she has strongly pushed for during her prior campaign for President and during her current stint as Vice President.

  • retreads of her and President Joe Biden’s policies of the last nearly four years
  • ban on fracking as part of her moves to eliminate our hydrocarbon energy capability
  • Medicare for all
  • open southern border
  • voting by and welfare payments to illegal aliens

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) said what Harris lacks to fortitude or the integrity to say out loud for voters to hear and evaluate:

  • eliminate the Senate filibuster
  • control the Supreme Court with term limits and packing
  • impose federal takeover of elections
  • pass enormous spending and tax-hike legislation
  • additional housing entitlements

Harris’ goals are damaging to our economy and destructive of our American culture, bringing in those millions of illegal aliens with no incentive to assimilate into our culture but having access to our voting booths. Schumer’s goals are damaging to our economy and destructive of our republican democracy, converting us to a popular democracy, a form that has never worked in 2,500 years of attempts.

Price Controls and Ways Around Them

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Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie, economics professor at George Mason University and emeritus economics professor at UC Irvine’s Merage Business Schoo, respectively, reflected on Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ price control scheme and some ways around them.

[C]competitive market forces will encourage them to do so, even when illegal.

Competitive forces, especially, are human nature: all of us want our goodies for as little as possible, and where there are at least two suppliers of something, those suppliers will compete with each other on some form of price in order to get our business.

Thus:

  • “shrinkflation”— keep prices the same but shrink the portions of goods
  • nonprice adjustments, such as relabeling/redefining “select” grade steaks as higher-ranking “choice” grades
  • hire fewer workers
  • devote less effort to cleaning produce
  • reduce hours of operation

Another major way, for all that it’s an illegal path—that pesky human nature—is the black market. Price controls are an open door for these to thrive, even where they’re illegal. And yes, that includes here in these United States. Keep in mind, especially vis-à-vis black markets that human nature—wanting stuff for as little as possible—can be made to work strongly against black market: free markets, especially those without price controls, will always and everywhere be able to produce goods and services at less cost and so for lower prices than can any black market. The latter’s production costs always include things that are intrinsically absent in free markets: the cost of evading the lawman along with the risk premium necessarily charged against the likelihood of getting caught.

Musk for NASA?

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That’s the suggestion for SpaceX’s (and Tesla’s, and a couple other enterprises) CEO Elon Musk from Hudson Institute‘s Arthur Herman. Both Musk and former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump say they are open to working with each other in a Trump administration.

An entrepreneur who isn’t afraid to fail, and thereby push, successfully, for more rapid progress than bureaucracies and their bureaucrats will permit, could be a good move for a bureaucratic and bloated agency like NASA, but….

The move would work only if Musk were given the hiring and firing authority the leaders of private companies have. With a government entity, though, that would be hard to achieve with all the unionized civil servants (over)populating NASA. This is, after all, the collection of bureaucrats with engineering degrees that gave us long, slow, cost-overrun and overrunning rockets for the return to the moon, and who can no longer even get a manned capsule to low earth orbit and back, leaving two aging astronauts stranded on the space station. It’s true enough that the rocket is reliable, but it’s still—all these years after SpaceX—an expensive use once and throw it away device, and Starliner appears not to work. Yes, yes, the rocket and its manned Starliner capsule were built by Lockheed-Martin’s and Boeing’s United Launch Alliance and by Boeing. But they were built under contracts let by those too-permissive bureaucrat engineers of NASA.

The long line of slow, bloated development and launch by NASA dates back to the period after NASA successfully landed astronauts on the moon and brought them back. It’s been those 50-ish years since, and no serious effort has been made to go back—it’s too expensive, say the NASA bureaucrats and the politicians of Congress, observing the expensiveness of NASA programs.

Another serious impediment to Musk having a chance of success at NASA is Congress. That body will be leery of angrifying unions generally and especially the Federal civil service unions by letting Musk get rid of the dead wood in NASA and bring in folks of his choosing. Even more, that body will be leery of Musk’s risk-taking, this time with tax dollars instead of his own and his private citizen shareholders.

My suggestion: give Musk a shot, with full backing from the White House. If he can’t bring about significant improvement in NASA’s performance and cost structure, then disband NASA altogether and leave its…programs…to the private enterprises in our private economy.