Those who can't do, teach.

Those who can't teach get some other government job...

I bet you the teacher is more than willing to accept a conservatives tax money though...

Yep - the space role of our federal government should be purely military defense. Orbital platforms are indeed the ultimate high ground, and kinetic kill devices would be awesome deterrents.

Of course, the spin-off affects of learning how to defend from space and take advantage of the resources there (Solar powered satellites feeding ground based rectenna farms, ultra-high powered lasers, asteroid mining, etc...) would spin off enormous opportunities to the private sector.

Long term it would likely be cheaper than our current way of 'defending' our country.

Great post Peregry - thanks!

You wouldn't have to ship them there - you'd just have to make them believe you were shipping them there...

MooHaHaHa (cough)

It's half the right answer though.

If Gingrich would tie it all together by pointing out that the governments role in the partnership would be in removing bad regulation so that private organizations could begin competing for the extraordinary benefits available from a space based society, he could make a good case for a moon base that would kickstart America. Of course, we'd need to repattern our society to admire successful businesses and business leaders again to make it really work.

Back when everything local was point-to-point and store and forward, I was one of the last hops before passing the data to 3M for transcontinental connections. I had always assumed that given IP's routing abilities the backbones were a mesh of those early corporate connections.

It's pretty frightening if there is a controllable number of throttle points - we really need to reduce the federal government to it's constitutional role. I'm too old to become a serf.

I'd like a reference on that - I just tried to find one and couldn't, but it's certainly possible that at some point the corporations that provide backbone services started taking money from governments. That didn't use to be the case in the USA.

I'm suddenly very curious about this - I sure as heck hope the backbones aren't maintained as part of our government.

That was true, but now the Democrats have started liking corporate welfare as well.

Good post...

I honestly don't see the purpose of including item 5. You can certainly not believe in any god and still believe in inalienable rights. Certainly religions other than Judeo-Christian believe in inalienable rights. Why muddy the waters and be divisive by bringing in a creator and a particular flavor of belief systems?

I'm not arguing to be argumentative - I'm arguing because those two items go against the grain of personal freedom espoused in the rest of the points, and they turn people away in droves. Abstract those two points and you will get a much greater number of people to agree with the overall series of tenets.

Aside from that I think the remainder is marvelous, and I appreciate your post a great deal - thanks!

$20,000,000,000 will buy 2,000,000 votes at $10,000 a pop. I think that's pretty much enough to swing an election - tell me again how Obama was the choice of the people?