I recall reading Ayn Rand’s massive potboiler novel Atlas Shrugged which was really terrible (her first novel The Fountainhead was good). One of the protagonists was an extremely competent woman (this part is good, a woman, yay!) who ran a railroad empire. Her brother was a timid, gibbering little simp. The point is, however, that this woman inherited the railroad empire from a 19th-century ancestor. How did the ancestor go about building this railroad empire?
With his own two bare hands!
Yessiree, the novel tells us he was a penniless drifter who climbed out of some swamp somewhere and with his own two hands erected a railroad empire, with no help from anyone or anything! (The reader is never informed HOW he accomplished this miracle.) At one point in the novel he even throws some nosy government agent down a flight of stairs. Throwing someone down a flight of stairs also occurs in The Fountainhead. I guess we can be grateful at least that Rand was not into depicting defenestration, though maybe stair-throwing was one of her sexual kinks, like, as I have read, wearing a mink coat and smoking a cigarette while getting screwed.
This was all in keeping with Rand’s bizarre idea that government is always the enemy and the only productive people in life are, I guess, those who climb penniless out of swamps to erect with their own two bare hands by themselves railroad empires and throw people down the stairs who annoy them. This notion did not stop her, however, from praising the Apollo moon landings. Guess she didn’t notice that these landings were not private enterprises.
I might add she was also a heavy smoker who smoked because held the ideological belief (!) that smoking represented man’s triumph over fire (!). Unfortunately she got diagnosed with lung cancer and croaked, though not before availing herself of the Social Security and Medicare benefits she allegedly despised and constantly railed against.
In reality, of course, the 19th-century railroads were erected with enormous government subsidies including loans and land grants. This was Keynesianism before Keynes. No penniless drifter ever crawled out of a swamp to build any of them.
But these subsidies were productive investments. They knit the country together and produced an enormous post-war economic boom.
Would the same be true for government subsidies to build moon bases? The western U.S., which the transcontinental railroads opened, were enormously profitable which is why the subsidies were wise. The moon is barren and dead. How would bases support themselves? How would they grow food? Mining might turn a profit long-term but not short-term. It seems that for a period of many years, such bases would have to be subsidized by enormous government investments without any promise of a decent return. Then, of course, there is the issue of enormous human risk.
I also admit to having some qualms about despoiling a largely pristine environment that carries the marks, like fossils, of billions of years of history. Perhaps the moon should be treated like a national park (even though it belongs to no nation by treaty, a treaty which alas will likely eventually be violated by either China or the U.S. or both).
As it happens I fear that what will really transpire, if we do get moon bases, is that both China and the U.S. will use them for military purposes. Let’s bring war to outer space!
en.wikipedia.org
