President Trump is half right about his 'Space Force'

I've always been a bit amazed by the degree to which one of the greatest economic transformations in our history has been ignored by the talking heads of the media and by historians alike.

Back in the 'Sixties, we heard all sorts of people saying what a shame it was that we were spending all that money on the space race when we had so many problems here on Earth. Somehow, the left always seems to assume that economics is a zero-sum game, and that to use the well-worn metaphor, to make anybody's slice of the pie bigger means that everybody else's must get smaller. Well, that's not the way it works.

I was in Washington for George W. Bush's first inauguration and remember the satirical poem on the front page of the Washington  Post that day entitled "Make the Pie Higher." It mocked the notoriously tongue-tied new president's tendency to mangle the English language and in particular his difficulty in communicating a simple but profound concept: that when the pie itself grows bigger (not higher), so does everyone's slice!  The "us-against-them," class warfare mentality is so ingrained in some folks that they fail to see that for the rest of us to do better, it isn't necessary some of us do worse. The same people also have trouble seeing that sometimes investing money is better than spending it because it ends up getting you more money to spend on the things you need than you would have if you spent it right away.

The race to the moon largely financed the Great Society. It created a demand which gave rise to a large number of new industries which put countless Americans, mostly but not entirely in the Western states, to work. The taxes paid by those new companies and the workers they employed were only the beginning.  Spinoff industries created countless new high-tech companies and employed even more people. All-in-all, the manned space program netted the Federal government exponentially more revenue than it spent on it!

And in the process, it drove national morale to an all-time high. Never before, certainly in my lifetime, have we as a people been prouder to have been Americans than we were the day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the moon.

All of this doesn't even consider the scientific knowledge we gained. The economy grew, and grew substantially, because of John F. Kennedy's decision that by hook or by crook we would get to the moon by the end of the 'Sixties. We all benefitted.

When the economy crashed in 2008, John McCain offered a solution: a crash program on the scale of our effort to reach the moon, only this time aimed at landing Americans on Mars.  Everybody scoffed. They shouldn't have.  President Obama's stimulus program doubtless helped to eventually end the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression and by the time he left office set us on the path to the relatively strong economy we enjoy today. But the precedent of the 'Sixties suggests that had McCain won that election, the recession might have ended more quickly and the economy might be in far better shape even than it is today, and perhaps without the vanishing of the American middle class.

Readers of this blog know very well that I am not a fan of President Donald Trump, and frankly his harebrained scheme for a new branch of the armed services- the Space Force- in itself is beyond bizarre. Granted, modern strategic realities increasingly involve space. If a Third World War is ever fought, one of its theatres will be space. But the nature of the combat war will be technical. We will not have armed astronauts shooting at each other, and should things ever reach the point where that sort of thing is even worth considering, we will have plenty of opportunities to address it then. For now, the Air Force and NASA  are quite sufficient. Moreover to create a "Space Force" would be to do substantially more than Russia and China are doing. It would likely set off an arms race in space that could seriously destabilize the international order and end up compromising rather than increasing our national security.

But Morgan Stanley likes the idea from an economic point of view, even speculating that it could lead to a trillion dollar economy.  I don't know about you, but I am in favor of a trillion dollar economy. But maybe it would be better to achieve it in a way that has some practical benefit and does not endanger world peace.

Right now the American effort in space is being privatized. Space X, Blue Origin, and similar companies are doing a great many things that NASA used to do- and, in some cases, is still doing.  This is a good thing. The resources of the Federal government are finite, and we are already at a point at which if the deficit grows much larger we will no longer even be able to pay the interest on the national debt.

But what if we could substantially increase the amount of money the government could take in the way we did back in the Kennedy and Johnson and early Nixon years? The right kind of investment could easily end up shrinking the debt, not increasing it. Why not spend the money Mr. Trump wants to spend on his "Space Force" subsidizing Space X and Blue Origin and other companies in the aerospace industry as they compete among themselves for solutions to the problems involved in sending human beings to Mars? The economy of several struggling Western states would blossom almost immediately. Competition between rival companies might well drive down costs, increase efficiency, and streamline the process. The private, for-profit nature of companies like Space X and Blue Origin would mean that the subsidies they would receive from the Federal government could be substantially smaller than the price tag on an effort by the government itself, such as we used to reach the moon.

On the other side of the coin, having competing American companies trying to get us to Mars- perhaps with the level government support for each based on how much progress they were making, the quality of the progress, and its cost- would result in a great deal of duplication and a great deal of inefficiency. But that very duplication might well also mean many more jobs and more tax income for the Federal government.

We have no need of a "Space Force," and the entire idea is ludicrous. But the idea of substantially increased government and private sector effort toward, say, reaching Mars is anything but ludicrous. It could be exactly what our economy needs; despite our improving economy income disparity is increasing.

That is a problem that needs to be addressed. The death of the American dream may be the greatest problem we face, right up there with our polarization and the general disintegration of our culture. A crash program to get to Mars increasing the role of private industry might not solve that problem, but a trillion dollar economy couldn't hurt.