The Space Age has Ended
The final space shuttle has launched. Bid farewell to the Space Age.
As a science fiction reader, I was raised on tales which predicted a future where we first explore, then colonize, the planets.
Those confident predictions were made without factoring in the drag on the world economy and the human spirit of that grotesque philosophy which has no name, but which is sometimes called sometimes Statism, sometimes Antichristianity, sometimes Neo-Barbarism.
They call themselves by a number of flattering names, as Progressive and Liberal and Peace Movements and Liberators of this or that. All such names are lies, the reverse of the truth, because the nameless philosophy seeks neither progress, nor liberty, nor Peace, nor liberation.
Whatever the philosophy is called, it is a very expensive one.
It has finally eaten the seedcorn, and mortgaged our future, and now we cannot make the payments. We have been foreclosed.
The nameless philosophy has never really liked the space program; rockets and suchlike smack of heavy industry, of science, of military prowess, of American exceptionalism.
The nameless philosophy thinks the money should be spent on welfare programs, that small is beautiful, that wind and solar power is sufficient to our needs, and that the best use of American Aerospace expertise is convincing the frothing anti-Semites and polygamists of the Middle East of how much our space program owes to the Paynim. Ah! (it seems to say) If only we had lost the battle of Lepanto, the world would be so much better off today!
To be sure, without America, there will still be some space launches. I am sure the mobsters ruling Russia or the subhuman thugs ruling China may seek the prestige of the occasional launch. I am sure the more civilized socialists in Europe might wish they had the funds for a space program, that is, unless they have to pay for another Greece after another as each country in their Union adopting the policy of spending other people’s money spends themselves into “underwater” unrecoverable debt.
To be sure, without government backing, private enterprise would take up the slack, if we lived in a private enterprise system as our fathers and grandfathers did. Our society seems to have crossed an essential tipping point, however: the members of that nameless philosophy seem to have convinced a sufficient number of our fellow citizens that other people’s money belongs to them, and that to allow people to keep their own money is akin to holding a gun to the head of the collective United States.
A society can endure as long as the number of people who think other people’s money belongs to them is small, or uninfluential. When they become the majority either in numbers or in influence (which may be disproportional to numbers), then the society creates an incentive to eat the wealth of others, not to produce wealth, and not to save. If savings are low, capital is hard to find, and interest rates go up. If the state sets the interest rates low in defiance of the market reality, it creates depressions and recessions. If the state seeks to cure the depression by inflating the currency, saving is de-incentivized all the more.
You cannot run a capitalist nation without capital. You cannot accumulate capital, and keep it save from government predation, if the state has the right to devalue and inflate the currency at will, and has the political shortsightedness to use that right because the majority view regards other people’s money as their own.
So, private enterprise may have been able to maintain a space program in the era of Standard Oil or Henry Ford. Even during the Postwar Boom it might have been possible.
Now? In the era when GM is Government Motors? When over a Trillion dollars in “stimulus money” was grifted from the taxpayers, laundered through teachers’ unions and other pets and friends of the political machine, and sent back into the coffers of the politicians?
Now? When we are in a global war that likely will last over a century, one where we catch and release enemy combatants after having soldiers read them Miranda Warnings?
Now? When one quarter of gross domestic product is absorbed by Big Brother, and the industrialists and bankers and moguls of Wall Street have finally become what socialists always claimed they were, officers and partners of government power? Do you think one of the fictional pioneering industrialists of space, such as we read as children, a Delos D Harriman or Anson Guthrie, were dropped into the midst of this modern Wall Street, he could prosper?
Now? When the simple honesty which was both the pride of the American businessman and the calculated long-term self-interest has been replaced with a system so corrupt that major corporations routinely falsify documentation and routinely perjure themselves in court?
No. The nameless philosophy has enjoyed uninterrupted triumph since 1968, moving from victory to victory, and even the greatest heroes of the opposing philosophy accomplished little more than holding rear-guard actions.
No. The Space Age is over.
Put away your science fiction books. Go read something with a unicorn on the cover, and dream about a past that never was. There is no future to dream of.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
