Worth the Price? Should We Even Need to Ask?

By Nicholas Snow | Published: 22 August 2011 

The Space Race in the 1960s was an epic battle for supremacy in space exploration between the United States and the Soviet Union. National pride and prestige seemed to be a driving force as the Cold War waged on. The Soviets were the first to send the worlds first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit and the US were the first to successfully land a man on the moon. The real question, though, boils down to whether or not this was all worth it? Certainly there were gains, many of them we are still seeing come to fruition but its hard to imagine the counterfactuals of what we missed by spending the money the way the Soviet and US governments did.

In today’s document, Henry Hazlitt’s 1962 Business Tide Column article for Newsweek entitled “Worth the Price?”, the question of whether the Space Race was worth the price is addressed. It is particularly interesting to see Hazlitt’s perspective given it was written before we had reached the moon. Hazlitt ultimately sounds as if the price is far too high and the reason deals with the inability of the government to properly assess the costs and benefits of engaging in the space exploration.

For many, if space exploration was to occur at all, it needed to be conducted by the state. The costs are simply too great and the ability to transform the possible benefits, such as scientific and technological discoveries, were too difficult to transform into “profits” for private businesses to undertake. But with a new space race starting to develop this claim is becoming less true.

The new race seems to be between NASA and private companies attempting to reach Mars.

Back in 2007 NASA stated the goal of putting a man on Mars by 2037 and recently the private company SpaceX, which is already attempting commercial space travel, stated their goal of establishing a means of getting to and from Mars.

As technology is improving the discovery process of the market is in full swing with entrepreneurs finding new ways of improving and satisfying the desires of his fellow man. And space exploration seems to be in the cards.

The difference between NASA and the private companies is in the price. With NASA we need to ask, like Hazlitt did some 50 years ago, is it worth the price? But with the private company, no such question exists because the market, through the profit and loss mechanism, provides the answer. Going to Mars is a risk; it may or may not be worth the price. With NASA the government takes our money whether we like it or not and there are no signals to say whether it was truly what people want or not. With private companies, however, if the venture is not worth it, they would know because they would have lost money. Money, which was voluntarily provided at the investor’s own risk. If it pays off then the rewards will be in the form of profits and others will follow suit, further reducing the costs and increasing the availability for others.

Asking whether something, particularly expensive as space exploration, is worth the price is an important question. And it is a question we should have a real answer for. So, maybe this, as with so many things, is another example of the state overstepping its bounds.

Download Hazlitt’s “Is it Worth the Price?” here.

The Debt Debacle and the Decline of Empire

Sisyphus on Wall Street
By THOMAS H. NAYLOR

Underlying the endless posturing, bickering, and mean-spirited name-calling associated with the recent Congressional debt ceiling debacle were three important unstated issues – size, excessive globalization, and imperial overstretch, issues which were never even mentioned during the heated Congressional debate.

First, the United States has simply become too big to govern. Second, it has exported too many jobs over the past three decades to China, India, and the rest of the world. Third, it is engaged in too many wars and has too many military bases (over 1,000) in too many countries (153).

Just as the Kremlin found it impossible to manage 280 million people in the former Soviet Union from one central bureau in Moscow, so too are the White House and the Congress finding it increasingly difficult to control 310 million Americans from Washington, D.C. Also, not unlike the former Soviet Union, the United States has a single political party, the Republican Party, disguised as a two-party system. The Democratic Party is effectively brain dead, having had no new ideas since the 1960s.

Three years after the onset of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, the battle rages on as to whether the government should raise or lower taxes, increase or decrease spending, or print even more money. In case you haven’t noticed, the government has been reducing taxes, increasing spending, and printing money as though it were going out of style, and it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. The economic recovery remains anemic, job growth is pathetic, and the tepid housing market shows few signs of life. Only the highly manipulated stock market temporarily responded positively to government policy.

Neither President George W. Bush’s 2001, 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut nor its 2003, $350 billion follow on could keep the U.S. economy out of recession. But that did not prevent the Obama administration from pushing through Congress a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts in December 2010.

Keynesian economics supporters rallied behind President Obama early in 2009 to gain Congressional approval for an $800 billion economic stimulus package. Although it may have helped prevent the loss of even more jobs, the stimulus package does not appear to have increased the number of new jobs significantly. The President’s $3.73 trillion budget request and projected $1.5 trillion deficit are more of the same. The spending cuts mandated by Congress recently as part of the deficit reduction bill are likely to result in even more job losses. However, they were insufficient to forestall a U.S. credit rating downgrade by S&P.

Following in the footsteps of his predecessor Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has kept the U.S. economy, and indeed the global economy, awash with money freshly printed by the government’s high-speed printing presses. He has primed the monetary pump with near-zero interest rates, loans to poorly managed mega financial institutions worldwide, and government bond purchases worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unfortunately the impact of all of this intense monetary policy activity on the housing market and the job market has been virtually nil.

What Bush, Bernanke, and Obama have failed to realize is that they have been engaged in a myth of Sisyphus struggle with Wall Street, which has presided over a thirty-year strategy of exporting real American jobs to Asia and elsewhere, all in the name of maximizing shareholder wealth. So many high-paying manufacturing and professional service jobs have been offshored that there are not enough people left who can afford to buy all of the Chinese plastic yuck that must be sold to sustain the American economy.

The neocons scream for more tax cuts, the liberal Democrats demand more government spending, and the monetarists call for even greater increases in the money supply, and it’s not going to make one whit of a difference. Sometimes when you make your bed, you actually have to lie in it. The effects of a thirty-year exodus of American jobs to the rest of the world cannot be reversed overnight.

It’s as though our national economic policy for the past decade has been under the control of three blind mice – Bush, Bernanke, and Obama. “See how they run. Did you ever see such a sight in your life?”

Driving the nation’s trillion-dollar plus military and national security budget is a foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, might makes right, and the proposition, just be like us. One result flowing from this insidious foreign policy is the never ending, highly racist war on terror (Islam) which has given rise to immoral, illegal, undeclared wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine (via Israel), Somalia, and Yemen. Weapons of mass destruction, the strategic missile defense system, the Cold War relic NATO, pilotless drone aircraft, outrageously expensive F-35 fighter jets, and 1.6 million American troops are all part of the program.

Size, a moribund economy, and excessive militarization were three of the major forces contributing to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the United States may be well on its way to replicating Soviet mistakes in an American setting. We have spent so much time, energy, and other valuable resources fighting the threat of terrorism that we have diverted our attention, our energy, and our resources from fixing our severely broken economy.

One major unstated conclusion of the debt ceiling debate must surely be that we can no longer afford a continuation of the military madness. It is not in our self-interest to keep perpetuating the myths, half-truths, and out-right lies that have fueled the war on terror since it was launched by President George W. Bush in 2001.

If we were to look back into the eyes of our old adversary, the Soviet Union, we just might see a mirror image of ourselves. We have become much more nearly alike than most Americans would care to admit.

Were Stalin and Mengele behind Roswell UFOs?

(Oh, man, this story is even better than the whole alien bit. I hope it's true. I mean, the part with Mengele and the deformed kids is twisted and sad, but it happened long enough ago that mourning for them passes quickly, unfortunately. 

But I've never bought into the whole "UFOs are space aliens" theory. I'd love it if they were coming here, it would add an air of mystique to our mundane existences, but I just don't buy it. This actually makes sense, and it's funny, though not so much "ha ha" funny.  Wow!--jef)

'Area 51' book says Stalin enlisted infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele in plan to scare US
By Mark Russell, News Staff
Posted May 16, 2011

(Newser) – Roswell and Area 51 have long been the focus of alien-hunting conspiracy theorists—and a new book's theory is likely to disappoint them. Annie Jacobsen's Area 51, a history of the top-secret base based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked there, presents an explanation for the famous "flying disc" that crashed in Roswell in 1947—and it's nearly as crazy as the UFO theory. Jacobson writes that Josef Stalin was inspired by Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, and wanted to throw the United States into a similar panic.

So Stalin enlisted Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who had fled to South America after World War II, to create a crew of "grotesque, child-size aviators" to fly in a Horton Ho 229 plane the Soviets had seized from Germany; in exchange, he would get a eugenics lab. Actually, children, ages 12 and 13 and described by Jacobsen as having "unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes," did not fly the plane; instead it was piloted remotely. But the Horton crashed in the New Mexico desert and authorities decided to hush up the incident, according the Telegraph.

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Annie Jacobsen Interview with Terry Gross of NPR 

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A new book suggests that a favorite incident of UFO conspiracy theorists was really just a Cold War attempt to scare Americans!

UFO conspiracy theorists may be in for a letdown. A new book —Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen — says no alien spacecraft crashed to Earth in the famous so-called Roswell Incident of 1947. According to Britain's Telegraph, Jacobsen says the craft that smashed into the desert in a terrible storm was actually a top-secret Soviet plane with "grotesque, child-size aviators" bred in horrific human experiments and sent by Josef Stalin to create panic in the U.S. Is that possible — or is this story even harder to believe than tales of shipwrecked aliens?

On the Soviet human experiments her source told her about

"The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman's bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn't compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. ...

"What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin."

On why the Soviets would have undertaken such a hoax

"The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack."

Area 51: Never Before Seen Photos of America's Secret Base

The crash of a disc-shaped aircraft in Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947 kicked off UFO speculation worldwide. In fact, the disc was a Russia spy plane -- one of many eye-opening revelations in AREA 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base

Alleged to be Stalin’s secret UFO study team are (standing left to right)
Sergei Korolev, chief missile designer and inventor of Sputnik; Igor Kurchatov,
father of Russia’s atomic bomb; and Mstislav Keldysh, mathematician, theoretician,
and space pioneers

In her new book AREA 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, which goes on sale May 17, Annie Jacobsen offers for the first time an inside look at the history of America's top secret military base. It is the first book based on interviews with the scientist, pilots, and engineers -- 74 in total -- who for the first time reveal what really went on in the Nevada desert, from testing nuclear reactions to building super-secret supersonic jets to pursuing the war on terror.

Jacobsen, a contributing editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, interviewed the former Area 51 employees in 2008 and 2009, shortly after the CIA declassified much of the work they had done, including countless pages of redacted memos and declassified reports. Area 51 is still officially a military secret, unmentioned by name, Jacobsen notes.

In this exclusive excerpt, Jacobsen reveals some of the wild research that went on in the 1970s at Area 51 -- where the military built the U-2 spy plane, rather than harboring crashed UFOs.

Part of a U-2 spy plane seen in 1955 coming out of a transport airplane at Area 51 -- where the secret craft was designed and perfected. The CIA’s first spy plane was so secret that Air Force pilots transporting it to Area 51 in pieces inside larger airplanes, would fly to a set of coordinates over the Mojave Desert and contact a UHF frequency called Sage Control for orders. Only when the aircraft was a few hundred feet off the ground would runway lights flash on.

"Operation Paperclip" scientists at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Until 1945, these men worked for Adolf Hitler, but as soon as the war ended these “rare minds” began working for the American military and various intelligence organizations, the details of which remain largely classified. Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun is in the front row, seventh from the right with his hand in his pocket.

Operation Plumbbob

In the summer and fall of 1957, a series of atmospheric nuclear tests — called Operation Plumbbob — were conducted above ground at the Nevada testing and training range, located just outside of Area 51. Twenty-nine explosions were set off while tests were conducted on troop readiness, accidental detonations and the effects of flying debris on living targets, according to documents declassified by the Department of Energy that Jacobsen details in her book.

During the explosions, security officer Richard Mingus stood guard outside many of the weapons-testing sites, including one with the largest atmospheric bomb that has ever exploded in the United States.

"The bomb goes off. Richard Mingus is at ground zero, safe away in a bunker somewhere, and suddenly someone realizes, 'My God, Area 51 is unsecured,' " Jacobsen says. "And so they send Richard Mingus through ground zero, 45 minutes to an hour after this nuclear bomb has exploded, so that he can get to Area 51 to guard the gate."

Mingus survived, as did many other atomic veterans who stood close to ground zero during other Plumbbob tests.

In Area 12 of the Nevada Test Site -- a separate though related nearby military facility --
workmen enter an underground atomic bomb tunnel through its mouth, summer 1957.

"You can absolutely drive through an atmospheric bomb test and not be affected," Jacobsen says. "Richard Mingus also stood guard at a test at a sub parcel of Area 51 ... [during] a dirty bomb test."

During the dirty bomb test, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission simulated a plane crash where plutonium was dispersed on the ground, to see what would happen if an aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon were to crash on American soil. The resulting fallout and structural damage made much of the land uninhabitable.

"The area out at Area 51 that was part of the Operation Plumbbob test continues to be contaminated," she says. "It was not cleaned up until the '80s. And at that point, they sent in men in hazmat suits to scrape the land."