Anti-Climacus

LINK: I consider the mission-to-Mars story (which Joshua Claybourn, among others, discusses well) to be so ridiculous as to not merit comment. I don't really buy the leftist line that all of the money we'd be spending on space could be better spent on schools, hospitals and military salaries--though they're all things worth spending money on. The argument seems a little insincere to me, as do most budget-related questions (the $87 billion for Iraq being another example), because it's nevr a question of do we spend our dollar here or our dollar there, as if there were only one, and giving more money to one area automatically made the others lose out. The genius part of the federal government is that it can, if it likes, procure two dollars and give one to each. Arguing that doing x takes money out of the hands of needy inner-city schoolchildren is about as serious as the argument that raising taxes takes money out of the hands of struggling small businessmen and farmers--it might, but it's certainly not a necessary consequence of those actions, and it's just demagoguery to say otherwise.