Going Ga-Ga over the Moon, continued.

Charles Krauthammer is a loony. He wants to go the moon. Your dime.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one's asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington -- "stimulus" monies that, unlike Eisenhower's interstate highway system or Kennedy's Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness -- to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

Try something REALLY hard, Chuckie. Leave people's money alone.

Gary North offers, in more sane terms:

The "put a man on the moon in this decade" program was the most spectacular and most beloved peacetime boondoggle in the history of bloated government programs. It achieved nothing of lasting value for the taxpayers – nothing that they would have paid for voluntarily.

The Apollo program was funded by tax money extracted from Americans who would otherwise have spent their money on unmemorable goods and services. These goods and services would have been higher on their list of priorities than the Apollo project. That is why it took coercion to fund the program.

The Apollo project was like a huge fireworks display. It was impressive at the time, but it is long gone. Even the tapes of the event are long gone. NASA erased them. No one knows why. What we see today are enhanced versions of video broadcasts.

To assess the value of the moon program, we should apply Frédéric Bastiat's principle of the fallacy of the thing not seen. Except for those of us at Rushdoony's Bible study, Americans with television sets saw the first moon walk. What no one saw were the products and services that would have been offered for sale from 1961 to 1969, had the government not taxed the public to fund the moon program. What inventions would have been discovered? We cannot know.

I call it the "chilling effect. Nobody sees, for example, the price of warrantless wiretaps, for they do not see the chilling effect on business communicaiton, say. Or the TSA on making air travel more cumbersome.

We pretend that NOTHING has a price - so we can just go ahead and do it. Walk on Mars? Let's.

The "stagflation" of the '70's was due in part to the deficit spending on Vietnam - and yes, NASA. American equity melted - and savings banks could return less than was lost on interest. Thus, the great American middle-class movement into stocks. Now, we see the result.

America has discovered something more noxious than taxation, and that is deficit spending. It is the doom of all governments. It is the promise to produce in the future what cannot be done in the present. There must be a damned good reason for deficit spending. But we don't know what it is.