Why no denunciations from the Right of the socialist, deficit-financed effort that put Curiosity on Mars?
Remember, every penny that went to put Curiosity on Mars was borrowed from the Chinese, and your grandchildren will be paying it back. Like the discovery of the Higgs boson, it was a purely socialist enterprise, without an nickel of private funding in it. I’d really, really like to hear just one Tea Party politician be consistent and denounce these two triumphs of the human spirit.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
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Strictly speaking, there was much more than one nickel of private money spent on the MSL. One of the instruments on rover was paid for privately after budget cuts teabagged the instrument from the project. See http://www.msss.com/msl/mardi/news/12Nov07/index.html
I don’t, because you know as soon as one does, they all will.
All of the money for the Iraq War was also borrowed by the Chinese.
As a libertarian, I’ll bite the bullet and allow the state-funded scientific research to continue and violate my oh-so-precious principles but can we at least get rid of the wasteful weapons systems that go not so much to keep Americans safe as to subsidize defense contractors in all 50 states? Can we decrease our non-essential international involvements? I’d really like to pull back at least a little from the oncoming fiscal disaster.
Also: Entitlement and tax reform.
…and the rest of the technological groundwork laid by socialist scientific research. Of course, they won’t, but they’ll be the first to point to the first guy to make a fortune applying the fruits of this long-term public investment into his private business, and proclaim him John Galt.