President Bush, having spent trillions of young people’s dollars on the prescription drugs of old people, now wants to throw billions at an expanded space program.
Now you won’t find a stronger advocate of space travel than myself. Space travel represents human reason and achievement at their very best. But why should the government be financing it? Why does President Bush, who’s supposed to be some kind of Reaganesque limited government conservative, think the government can and should master space?
Notice that the government didn’t settle the American West. Individuals, acting on their own initiative, did. The only role government had to play was establishing and enforcing private property rights. If the government ever managed to develop civilizations in space, any colonies would probably be handed over to the U.N.–perhaps out of guilt for going to war with Iraq when it made most of the U.N. angry. If President Bush really cared about space, he would propose steps to privatize space travel and establish private property in space, thereby making it worthwhile for a private company or organization to consider undertaking such a mission on its own.
The verdict is in. President Bush is no free marketer; he’s no champion of a private property order. He’s not even a Reagan conservative (Reagan being the closest we came to such a leader in modern times).
Bush clearly wants to be John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was a Big Government statist, through and through, who happened to believe in cutting taxes and, unlike contemporary Democrats, the use of American military force. That’s Bush.
He’s not motivated by private property rights nor even basic civil liberties, as his signing of the campaign finance “reform” law–actually a censorship law–demonstrates.
He spends blindly and wildly on every government program he can, while an unthinking and unblinking Republican Congress–who never would have let Bill Clinton get away with it–happily signs on.
Mr. Bush is on a spending binge unparalleled by any other President except perhaps Lyndon Johnson or F.D.R. Who would have thought that the next great liberal statist President would not have been Bill Clinton or Al Gore–but George W. Bush. My question is this: why aren’t the better conservatives talking about this? There’s an elephant in the White House; and nobody is discussing it.