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"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason." -- Thomas Paine Introduction Since I published "The Top Ten Deckchairs on the Federal Titanic" on Cloth Monkey in late 1996, I have been very pleased with the reactions I've been getting in my messageboard, through e-mail, and in personal comments. The comments have been uniformly intelligent and reasoned, bolstering my impression that the Libertarian Party is the party of the thinking man (and woman). The most astonishing event has been the news that my little missive has been assigned as required reading in a political science course at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. For someone who barely stumbled through an Elizabethan literature degree, I am deeply moved by the recognition. Also, as an indirect result of the page, I am now doing some volunteer work for the Libertarian National Committee here in Washington, working on a web project that should be unveiled soon. (I'll let you know what it is on the main Cloth Monkey page when I can.) For those of you who want to get in on the ground floor of something that I think is going to be very big in the years ahead, give the LNC a call -- they only have 9 people on staff right now, they'd love to talk to you, and you can in future years say that you knew the luminaries of the Libertarian Party "back when." A major theme of the comments I've received has been "How could you have missed [fill in the useless government agency]?" God knows there are more than 10 agencies, departments and entities in the federal government that deserve to go down the memory hole. Here are the next ten. This is hard for me. I bow to no one in my admiration for the job NASA performed in the 1960's in its audacious assault on the moon. My vicarious involvement in the Gemini and Apollo programs were one of the high points of my life. If, indeed, government has a role in exploration, this was the prototype in how to do it right. But the last moon landing was over a quarter of a century ago. (Really? Time flies, doesn't it?) What has NASA done since then? Mostly, they've wasted your money. Since the Apollo program ended, the vast majority of NASA's budget has gone into the dreaded space shuttle. The shuttle is the classic government screwup, a spaceship designed by a committee with the apparent mandate to make it as expensive, useless and dangerous as possible. When Congress signed off on the shuttle in 1972 (only to mess with it innumerable times before the first flight in 1981), the only reason it was approved was that NASA proposed it as a self-supporting venture, paying its own way through commercial satellite launches. (But not on a competitive basis -- for the first 5 years of the program, commerical satellites were forbidden from using any other launch vehicle besides the shuttle.) Outside of swallowing the initial stupid assumption (why should the government provide commercial satellite launches?), Congress should never have believed the cost estimate. NASA officially lists the cost of each shuttle mission as $400 million, but that's just standard weirdo government math. Here's the simple numbers -- if you take the total annual cost of the shuttle program ($15 billion) and divide by the usual 12 flights a year (not the 100 Congress was promised), you get one and a quarter billion per flight. Per flight. NASA does charge corporate clients for satellite releases, but the fee averages only a measly $150 million per flight. Why so little? Because that the open market cost of a launch. If NASA charged any more, no one would pay for a shuttle deploy, and even that little subsidy would go away. For all its size and expense, the shuttle is a fairly useless vehicle. It can only take off from one place (the thunderstorm and hurricane capital of the US, I might add), and can only land in the same place or incur a $2 million charge to ship it home on the back of a 747. Both takeoff and landing require an ungodly amount of equipment and personnel to achieve each. It is limited to a maximum altitude of 275 miles, just barely sufficient to reach Mir (after it was lowered 40 miles). It can't carry into orbit any payload that requires an upper stage or carries nuclear fuel. It can't change orbital planes worth shit, and it can't launch or land in the rain because the high-speed drops would damage the heat tiles. Because of these limitations, more and more satellite builders and owners are looking elsewhere for launch services. They're even turning to China, for God's sake. What worse indictment can you imagine than that a company would trust Chinese rockets over the space shuttle? On top of all this is the danger. If you had told Von Braun or any of his brethren 30 years ago that we would be launching people into orbit on top of solid fuel rocket boosters, they would have dismissed you as a raving lunatic. The big white solid rocket boosters on either side of the shuttle assembly (necessary because of budget cuts imposed by Congress) are simply giant Roman candles, with no throttle, off switch or any means of escaping them at all if they go bad -- as we all know. Add to that the balls-to-the-wall, hyper-complicated hydrogen engines in the shuttle itself, the lack of any escape systems, and the unbelievable expedient of unpowered descent and landing (in a vehicle with the glide characteristics of a set of car keys) and you have a supremely dangerous machine. I don't know about John Glenn or Barbara Morgan's judgment -- the ultimate put-down is that even I wouldn't fly in the damn thing. But even the shuttle isn't the biggest white elephant in NASA's tent. Next year, they start launching the modules of the International Space Station (nee Alpha, nee Freedom). This $90 billion monstrosity will serve no purpose other than to wave our flag and those of the participating countries, and put the government once again in the immoral position of using tax dollars to further private concerns. Even with its corporate welfare aspects, the station's intended customers (medical, scientific and research firms) want nothing to do with it. But we're building it anyway. In the larger sense, why do these machines even exist? NASA's reasons are usually given as "commercial development of space" and "America's presence in space." NASA has gotten into the habit of chanting the mantra of "commercial applications" whenever the costs of these programs are questioned, much like the Clinton Administration ties every freedom-robbing nutball idea to "our children." If anyone does start manufacturing medicines or ball bearings or anything else on orbit, it will be with the massive, anti-competitive subsidy of an eleven-figure government investment -- the worst kind of corporate welfare. As for our presence in space -- what they really meant was "a presence to counter the Soviets." Wake up, guys -- we're sharing their space station! The rest of NASA's budget is fairly miniscule. The folks at JPL have proven in a spectacular fashion that low-cost science missions like Mars Pathfinder and Lunar Explorer can provide brilliant science at a cost so low that they could even be performed even more efficiently by university consortiums. NASA is a hollow shell of its former self, launching pointless flights and building massive machines nobody wants at a mind-numbing price. NASA - if a space nut like myself wants to dump you, you'd better start looking over your shoulder. People laughed at Cal Coolidge's great line, "The business of America is business," but he was absolutely right. This nation was founded as a haven from unreasonable government incursion into our lives, including our choice of businesses and how we operate them. Given that, why do we need a Department of Commerce? It's like asking fish to establish a Department of Swimming. As agencies go, DOC is pretty small -- it's FY 98 budget is about $2 billion. Half of that funds the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is a conglomeration of orphan environmental and scientific agencies gathered together and stuck under the Commerce umbrella in 1970 after a failed attempt by the Nixon Administration to form a Department of the Oceans. (Seriously.) NOAA runs the weather service, the weather satellites, a series of marine fisheries, and a few scientific organizations covering the oceans and the atmosphere. I assume we all, at this point in the deckchairs, agree that there is nothing that government can do as well or as efficiently as a private concern -- a core principle of libertarianism. Think of the National Weather Service, and then think of the Weather Channel. They both have access to the same raw satellite and observational data. But the Weather Channel does a better job of collating, predicting and presenting their results -- and manages to make a profit at the same time. (And that's not an unfair comparison -- NWS does not use their own data, but gets it from another part of NOAA called NESDIS, the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.) If we took NWS out of the equation, we could have a number of competitive services providing weather data. How much better would the weather forecasts be if they were provided by private competitive companies, each one becoming more accurate, efficient and cheaper as time goes on? A lot, I would bet. More lives would be saved, more property spared, and your taxes would no longer pay for the NWS director's Mercedes I used to park next to at NOAA headquarters. The definition of win-win. The government has no business running a commercial venture like a marine fishery. I've never been able to figure out how the National Marine Fisheries Service, or the Seafood Marketing Council ("Eat fish and seafood twice a week!") ended up with taxpayer money. The scientific agencies mostly just fund grants to universities. And don't get me started on the uniformed NOAA Corps and their fleet of oceanographic ships. Deep-six the whole lot of them. The rest of Commerce is a hodgepodge of dinky agencies with moronic purposes. The Minority Business Development Administration. The Export Trade Administration. The Bureau of Economic Analysis. The United States Travel and Tourism Administration (I kid you not). Name one thing any of these racist, anti-free trade, and jingoistic agencies has done to better your life. The one function in Commerce that is specifically called out in the Constitution is the Bureau of the Census. What should be a simple headcount in order to allocate congressional representation has become a mind-numbing political quagmire, since all that data that they ask for unconstitutionally (How many bathrooms? What's your income? Have you stopped beating your wife?) is used by Congress to determine where trillions of dollars in welfare and feel-good programs get spent. I just today heard a report on NPR that the Clinton Administration is planning to use statistical sampling to expand the number of minorities in the 2000 census, since the current liberal theory is that the census undercounts minorities by 10%. (I listen to NPR for the same reason that Navy admirals used to drink from coffee mugs with the Soviet Navy flag and the Russian inscription "Know Your Enemy -- Drink From His Cup" inscribed on them.) If you know of one single fact that supports this idiotic notion of undercounting, I'll eat your hat. Census needs to count heads, and count heads only. (While I'm on the subject, let me put in a plug for the Libertarian Party's Operation Colorblind. Whenever you're asked your race on a form, leave it blank. If we are ever going to get to a colorblind society, we have to get the government to stop obsessing about race. When the Republicans won Congress in 1994, one of their main proposals was to abolish DOC as a cost-cutting gesture. Well, it didn't take long for the freshmen to become career criminals like the rest of them. If they can't get rid of a ludicrous construct like the Department of Commerce, they haven't got a hope in hell of doing anything right.
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10. The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration