The Government Could Never Run SpaceX: Technical innovation works best under capitalist markets

Again, let’s make something clear.  The government cannot make things, and most everything it does in most cases is terrible.  However, we need the government to maintain national and statewide concerns.  You need just enough government to manage a community but never enough to become tyrannical.  So, I’m not an anti-government guy, but I am an anti-stupid guy.  Dumb people tend to be drawn to government work because they hope the power of government will cover up how stupid they are and can hide it from the world; government tends to have all the wrong people in it from top to bottom, so what we let them do has to be managed to a minimum.  Those same people never become magically competent and suddenly make things better by attending a few meetings and acquiring some name tag at a meet and greet where they draw their name on it with a marker.  So it is absolutely absurd that anybody in government thinks they could do anything with SpaceX other than fill out a permit, which they can’t even do promptly.  But that is the word on the street, now that they’ve seen that the Starship from SpaceX is going to be successful, with the third test flight coming up soon, there are leaked talks that the government wants to take over the Starship as a “national necessity” and make it part of the military.  First of all, I do not doubt that the government in any form, through the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the Space Force, the Air Force, or any branch of government, thinks that all civilian enterprises as valuable as SpaceX have become, should be held down to the limits government can provide.  Many in government believe that no company such as SpaceX should exist beyond the control of government and that they can’t be the first to claim the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies as a private company, set up bases, and govern people in the far reaches of space. 

There are many people who think only a government can have power that is then accountable to voters, and they can never get their minds wrapped around the purpose of government in the first place, which is why we have the current Civil War that we do in the world, the corporations against free people.  Who does the government report to, and what is its purpose?  Corporations use the power of government not as capitalist, free market enterprises but as clubs to beat down their competition and secure their stake in the marketplace.  Pfizer comes to mind in its relationship with the World Economic Forum to be in the business of making bioweapons in a Wuhan lab and releasing them during election years to control who runs countries through stolen elections so that they can then use government to force private people to consume their product.  I don’t think SpaceX will let the government take over anything.  They have shown that they can partner with the government, such as they have with NASA, to have success, but such relationships have slowed SpaceX down a lot, not made it better.  But because the government regulates so much of the space industry, such partnerships are essential, if not stupid.  Amazingly, SpaceX has managed to do as well as with such government partnerships.  But now that SpaceX has been successful, with the Falcon rockets and the Dragon programs, now that Starship is ready to make its mark as a very efficient space taxi, many in the government are having delusions that they could run SpaceX better than the private market and that is just absurd, and will never happen.  It can’t happen. 

Government workers cannot perform at the rate of technical innovations required for the space industry.  They don’t have it in them, and the nature of government prevents such a possibility.  So, for the government to take over SpaceX in any way is unrealistic.  Like everything they do, from building highways to teaching children in schools, the government cannot perform the task better than free markets.  The concept of profit fuels ambition, and the typical government bureaucrat, even in the military forces, can not do great things without the idea of profit being used to fuel the task.  And profit doesn’t just come in the form of money.  It can come in the ambitions of a future task, but those who can provide opportunity tend to evoke such ambition that creates invention.  All government work tends to fall under a structured concept that limits the work to the scope of the people doing it.  In the private industry, people tend to rise to meet the needs of the work.  However, in government-managed enterprises, the work is limited to the skills of the people who manage to get into government work because of multiple psychological problems that draw them to it.  This is why there aren’t more companies like SpaceX: they never grow so big and powerful in such a short time and on such a scale that the government doesn’t see them as a threat and destroys them well in advance.  When you watch a SpaceX launch, and the crowd cheers the way they do, there is a collective celebration from the human race with each new achievement that is quite audible.  That’s because people know.  They know how significant many of these technical innovations are and that SpaceX has been able to outrun the limits of government to achieve them for the betterment of everyone.

It is a problem that civilization has reconciled that has not occurred yet in our development over many thousands of years.  Work is done best by free people who benefit from the invention, as opposed to controlling powers manipulated by a few administrators who can distribute that power based on favors.  Depending on the ratio of those effects, you can know if your civilization is good and successful or oppressive and tyrannical.  And no tyrannical civilization has ever been successful at innovation and invention.  That’s why communist countries like China must steal everything they do.  They cannot think independently because they use the power of government to hide their incompetence through collective government power, so they stifle creative thought instead of unleashing it.  To do what SpaceX wants to do over the next decade, there are literally millions and millions of inventions that will have to occur from many more sources than SpaceX to make it happen.  But the effort starts with them and their free ability to meet marketplace demands.  But without profit being the key to their operation, none of it will occur, and the government will regulate the industry back to the stone age, which is the only thing they can do predictably, holding back innovation and the spirit of invention.  America and American capitalism have been more successful than any other place in the world because we have a country that prevents government from harming people more than any other place, so companies like SpaceX can form.  A company like SpaceX would never occur in a communist country like China.  They can copy but can’t create, which is the rule in most endeavors.  In that way, anybody who is worried that the government will take over SpaceX can rest assured that it won’t.  They might try, but once they did take over SpaceX operations, they would ruin everything they had built, and it would be just a matter of months before the government would celebrate screwing in a light bulb rather than unleashing flights into space.  And that is being kind to the light bulb. 

Rich Hoffman

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