Monthly Archives: November 2014

A Bureaucratic State

Posted on by
Reply

The Hong Kong protestors have called for Hong Kong’s legislators to resign, which would trigger elections right there in Hong Kong and which would also serve as a popular referendum on Hong Kong’s—and the PRC’s—government policies.

Hong Kong’s response? From Chief Secretary Carrie Lam:

There are no arrangements in place for a so-called referendum in Hong Kong’s electoral and political system….

The bureaucrat is incapable of imagining doing anything non-standard, the bureaucracy cannot find a way to accommodate the people when there’s nothing in their written-down procedures to show them the way. The bureaucracy, any bureaucracy, is incapable of dealing with the noise of democracy, whether popular or republican or any other form. Bureaucracies simply have no flexibility.

Yes, I’m being generous in laying this off to bureaucracy and not anything else, but the point is valid in any event: despotism is even more inflexible, especially regarding things of which the despot disapproves.

Commercial Space Flights

Posted on by
Reply

…and accidents. Last week an Orbital Sciences commercial rocket, launched on an ISS resupply mission from NASA’s Wallops Island, VA, facility, exploded shortly after launch. There were no injuries. A few days later, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo exploded shortly after release from its mother ship; this time, one of the pilots of SpaceShipTwo was killed and the other injured.

The handwringing has begun. These two accidents may spell the end of commercial manned space flight. They may be the death knell of commercial rocket flight. They may spell doomsday.

Nonsense.

Both of those programs are in early development stages; accidents and failures are a normal, if unfortunate, part of the process. That a man died in one of them is especially unfortunate, but that also is a risk that’s run in this sort of development.

Another commercial rocket company has been flying resupply missions to the ISS for two years—not always glitch-free, but successfully. It remains on track to begin flying manned resupply missions to the ISS in the 2017 time frame.

NASA’s manned space flight program lost astronauts to space capsule fires while on the ground; it lost astronauts to Shuttle explosions both on launch and on return to orbit. It almost lost astronauts when an explosion occurred on an Apollo capsule that was in space, headed to the moon.

Our aircraft development programs have lost pilots to accidents during development, and we have lost passengers to crashed production commercial airliners, including one that disappeared last spring while enroute from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Certainly Orbital Sciences and Virgin Galactic need to learn what went wrong on these flights, as did NASA need to do and aircraft developers need to do. Airlines need to understand what went wrong regarding their accidents. All need to correct those things. They did, and they do, and OSC and Virgin Galactic will, too. It’s all a normal part of development.

Commercial space flight, whether manned or unmanned, is not at risk from these two accidents, but only from the angst being drummed up by the doomsayers.

When, not if, commercial flight becomes routine—whether for tourism or for operations—we’ll all be the better off for having gotten another industry, seeded by government, out of government’s hands.

Vote!

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s the day. It’s not only your right, it’s your duty, to vote for your choices to represent you in Congress (and in 2016 for your choice for President, too) and for your choices in any other question on your particular ballot. Keep in mind, too, that if you don’t vote, you give increased weight to another’s vote—and he may not be voting for your interests.

As our Declaration of Independence says,

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

And

…it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This is your chance to do so.

Another Case for Tax Reform

Posted on by
Reply

British Prime Minister had this to say Thursday (if that link doesn’t work, the Daily Mail has a good summary and paraphrase):

We know the economic case for cutting taxes: in a competitive world we cannot afford to carry on as a bloated, high-taxing, welfare-heavy nation.

We have to direct our resources to incentivising work through tax cuts and not incentivising welfare through extra benefit entitlements.

We have to fight the notion that you can endlessly suck more taxes out of businesses and bite the hand that feeds…. For me, the simplest way to help with living standards is this: allow people to take home more of their own money.

And

Every single pound of public money started as private earning. Every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work: early morning alarms, long commutes, hours spent on the factory floor, the office, the hospital ward, or the classroom.

The Wall Street Journal rightly offered kudos for this awakening, but they missed a key point.

[T]he case for tax cuts is as much about freedom as it is about spurring growth.

True enough. But freedom is what allows those spurs to exist. Freedom is what allows economic growth to occur. Freedom is what allows prosperity.

Democrats’ Myths

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal published a list of 10 Democratic Party myths that they’ve been pushing during recent campaign seasons. Here are a couple of their dog-whistle myths to keep in mind as you go to the polls tomorrow.

Raising the minimum wage helps the poor. The president wants to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25, with the tagline “Let’s give America a raise.” The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the hike would cost 500,000 jobs, one blow to the low-wage earners it claims to help. Employment aside, only 18% of the earnings benefits of a $10.10 hike would flow to people living below the poverty line, according to analysis from University of California-Irvine economist David Neumark. Nearly 30% of the benefits would go to families three times above the poverty line or higher, in part because half of America’s poor families have no wage earners. Minimum-wage increases help some poor families—at the expense of other poor families.

And

Voter ID laws suppress minority turnout. More than 30 states have voter-ID laws, which the left decries as an attempt to disenfranchise minorities who don’t have identification and can’t pay for it. Yet of the 17 states with the strictest requirements, 16 offer free IDs. The Government Accountability Office this month released an analysis of 10 voter-ID studies: five showed the laws had no statistically significant effect on turnout, four suggested a decrease in turnout (generally among all ethnic groups, though percentages varied), and one found an increase in turnout with voter ID laws in place.

And again: go vote.