Excellent observation. It is now going on three decades that Republicans have had little concern for dealing “with the aftermath of thier actions” and depending more and more to jump from issue to issue based on how it offers an opportunity for reelection rather than what is best for the peiople of our country. As a group, they could almost be diagnosed as having a political obsessive compulsive disorder….

Until they learn to deal with the aftermath of their actions, kowtowing is not in the best interests of the United States of America.

Its likely that with private market efforts we’d have a permanent space presence for people by now, and we’d have done robot visits to the asteroids to drag some of them back.

You, my friend, look to be more of an Old Skool Democrat, from the days of yore, when the Democrats weren’t insane. Its natural for you to feel uncomfortable in a party driven by conservative principles. But quit tilting at windmills, and try to help good managers on the Right get in. All that other stuff from gay marriage to resistance to auto bailouts is part of the package. Otherwise, you could try to take back the Dems from the nuts.

I quite agree with you on the waste in the War on Poverty.

For nuclear power and oil drilling, gov’t needs to create reasonable policies, and then get out of the way.

Actually, you’re pretty socialistic. You’re just in favor of smart and fiscally prudent socialism. And you think ideology and mental frameworks are unimportant except as distractions–this is profoundly incorrect, but I don’t have time to explain that in detail, even if I could.

Defense is ok by the Constitution. Enumerated powers again. Space Power Sats aren’t. Have faith in the free market first, and if its not working then consider what gov’t disincentives are getting in the way, and lastly, consider setting up a new framework to let the market work (One thing is legal rights–as I understand it, you can’t legally own part of the Moon. Not sure if thats correct, but if its true, then you’re not going to have any investment in moon cities until someone can say “I have the deed right here” which is gov’t work, but this was mostly caused by a gov’t treaty.)

Strange analogy; incorrect conclusion. The part I think you’re missing is that CA farmers already had a working system to get product to market.

But in power sats, this isn’t the case. There isn’t a working system in place for evil government to clobber in the name of progress (or more to the point, profits for Harriman/SantaFe.) What we’re talking about is inventing the system. Different thing altogether.

Power sats are more akin to the development of the Apollo program. Private industry was a big part of it, obviously, but wholly unable to do this by itself. Government had to be involved. It’s not possible to argue that the space program has failed to return multiples of the investment. We couldn’t use our fancy machines to communicate in this manner, for one thing…

And investment — that’s an important concept. It’s how I see the primary difference between the left and the right in practical terms. Not the “nebulous goal” aka wishful thinking terms, but the day to day reality: the left takes your money and throws it down a well; the right tends to take as little as it needs to invest in infrastructure. The things I mentioned earlier (computers, internet, etc.) were investments in infrastructure. That’s probably the primary reason I cheer when the right is in power; they will invest tons into the defense industry which later translates to practical stuff you and I can use. (I submit GPS as but one low hanging fruit example.) The left meanwhile doesn’t get this and hates the military. Their vision of what to do with YOUR money is to put up basketball courts in inner city downtowns and provide make work programs for those unqualified to actually do anything useful in society. (You want to add up the $$ spent on diversity and so on? It would make us all throw up.)

Energy policy by the left is typical. Tons of OUR money is going to be spent on windmills and guaranteed boondoggles that will never work, nuclear plants won’t be built, and we’ll pretend that we’re protecting caribou herds or the atlantic sea star by not drilling for evil oil. Not only is this not rational, it’s not even really a policy so much as a vague green written description of a mission statement, which will be undoubtedly embraced by the likes of Pelosi. It’s even worse than Malthusian. The “greens” out there would love to tax gas to European levels so that we all quit driving and quit emitting the dreaded CO2 molecule. Maybe they’ll get lucky and we’ll all die. Then they’d be really happy. They’re not going to stop. Letting the left dictate energy policy is a very bad thing: Jimmy Carter will seem downright quaint. This is not something our party OR the American people can afford.

tenn — “Now, I’m a conservative, and not a libertarian, so I admit the usefulness of some gov’t action, but its far more modest I suspect than a ‘big government conservative’ would like.”

Big government? The TSA seems to be nothing more than an employment act for imbeciles with a goal of making sure we know we’re subjects, not citizens. I don’t like “big” government, and the TSA is just that. I *do* like investment, especially that which takes the socialists out of their game.

My argument is that government investment is part and parcel of the republican party, so there really shouldn’t be much objection to it. Really, it’s a matter of where the line is drawn. The left wants you to get government sponsored feng shui training when you go in for your mandatory taxpayer funded diversity classes. These are right after your taxpayer funded Chinese classes so you’ll learn how to address your new masters after the left has finished exporting every job we have. The right wants to put big $$$ in military hardware so that our guys and gals in the field can live to tell stories about it. Same money. Different ideas on what to do with it. One of these is an investment, and it ain’t the Chinese lessons.

How is crying “Whaa! Whaa! Whaa! The media doesn’t like me! OH, Boo, Hoo, Hoo!”, explain WHAT a party stands for?

The Republican party needs to grow a pair, come up with a plan, kick out the whiners, tell the extremists to shut the hell up, and get back to real business for the first time in 50 years.

Y*A*W*N…typical response… blah blah blah…

It’s too bad you threw out the mirrors in your aprartment long ago: “Though doth protest to often, methinks.”

It does little good for Africans to have something without rule of law. Witness Mugabe who took successful farms and stole them and gave them to his thugs who promptly ran them into the ground.

Your third para. starting with ‘the left will cause’ is correct, almost. In the current environment with a massive government, its unrealistic to assume that gov’t won’t be involved. Gov’t frequently creates the problems that it later solves. But its not empty sloganeering….its a pole star so that those with a conservative bent don’t end up getting lost and finding themselves by degrees turning to liberal plans.

I’m okay with X Prizes, for now. If we hadn’t been crippled by gov’t, we wouldn’t need them, but we are, and so we have to deal with the mess as it is.

I’m aware that gov’t sets the field with basic regulations and it should. Coolidge told Wall Street that without laws their property would be worth as much as a corner lot in Babylon.

I do not accept that gov’t investment for major projects is needed. The farmers in the Central Valley shipped their goods by mule train, and did all right. It wasn’t economical to put in a railroad, but with gov’t help it got done. A victory for your viewpoint, right? Then the railroad used its economic muscle to crush the farmers, and to bribe congress to keep other competitors out. And people blamed capitalism.

Creating the arena, certain minimal and obvious effects like X Prizes can be worthwhile, but most of the problems gov’t solves, it created. Robber barons were the creation of gov’t..

The concept you’re looking for is ‘enumerated powers’. A gov’t strong in certain areas, but only those areas avoids the twin perils of weakness and anarchy on the one hand, and strength and tyranny on the other.

Thus yes, we spend a lot on defense. Its one of the enumerated powers. Space programs aren’t.

Its probable that the best thing the gov’t could do to advance the space program is to get out of the way. Even if not, freedom is more important than prosperity.

If the gov’t had a stable currency, and a reasonable regulatory environment, I believe we could come up with the money to exploit space and build a SPS. One of the chief problems with such a program is that the owners would no doubt be sued into oblivion by enviromentalists freaked out about a microwave beam landing in the dessert somewhere at an antenna farm.

Now, I’m a conservative, and not a libertarian, so I admit the usefulness of some gov’t action, but its far more modest I suspect than a ‘big government conservative’ would like.

The one thing that idealogues like you have, by definition, is a lack of pragmatism. The one thing that elevates all of mankind and makes for economic success is energy. There is an undeniable correlation of economic success and availability of energy. No energy? No economy. Look at Africa. Provide energy and everything else is possible. The #1 problem we all face going forward is energy.

The left will cause untold misery; they wish to mickey mouse around with society using energy and access to it as the currency, all in the name of global warming. They will restrict drilling. The taxpaying public is going to take it in the shorts to build idiotic windmills and other boondoggles that won’t work. Billions of $$ worth. The one big thing the right can and is obligated to do is stop this nonsense in its tracks. The money is going to be spent. The job of the right is to spend as little as possible and do so wisely, not prance about tilting at empty, intellectually bankrupt sloganeering.

Initially it takes government to do space power. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but there are no fully spacefaring corporations. Only a small club of nations can even put a human in space. NATIONS. Right here right now corporations don’t have that ability, nor will they for the forseeable future. The only way this can happen is via the government.

Now, one way of government involvement is to offer prize money like the X prize; e.g. “the first entity that can launch and operate a solar sat for 365 days generating 100 MW of power will receive no less than 20 Billion dollars.” That’s enough incentive to make people pay attention. But make no mistake government will need to be involved.

Note that I didn’t call for a “government program” as you have just claimed. I said the government will need to be involved, and there’s no way government can get involved without SOMETHING getting bigger somewhere. Laws, regulations, oversight, infrastruture assistance, there’s going to be some growth somewhere to make this happen.

I’ll mention Reagan again. He “grew” government involvement getting SDI infrastructure in place. Government was and has been involved with development of computers, missiles, semiconductors, and yes, the very means by which you can type your anti-government horsepuckey for us all to read. It had to be; these were expenses that private industry couldn’t bear by itself. Ironic, really.

The idea that government investment isn’t a conservative concept is just laughable. I figure one can choose reality or silly bumper sticker slogans.

Now, lets review a few simple ideas.
1. Moderate RINOism lost the last election.
2. If you disagree, you’re a hardcore. That is, the type of person who gets their teeth kicked in, and comes up shouting “I won.” Admirable in a way.
3. Conservatism is not to blame for the failure, neither is Libertarianism. Neither were tried in the last two elections.
4. Victory comes from exciting the base, and then finding a way to attract some of the middle to your side. Mohammad does not go to the mountain, the mountain comes to him. This does require that Conservatives look and listen and find a way to deal with some centrist concerns, but from a conservative perspective.
5. The Middle, the Moderates, the Center….its not some firm mass of people with all the same views. It shifts back and forth. And Moderate A will disagree with Moderate B on a number of issues, I propose.
6. Social Conservatism is more popular than Republicanism. So, yeah, lets toss out the gay marriage issue 30-0 winning record, and immigration control with 70% of America supporting it, and restrictions on abortion with massive support because throwing away winning issues always makes sense.
7. The Standard Conservative, the great mass of the R party, is strong on values, defense, and fiscal responsibility. He is a social conservative. The fiscal conservative tends to be weak on values, possibly okay on defense, and frequently weak on the economy as well. Notice the cry for a government program to build solar power satellites instead of trusting the free marked as a conservative would.

I propose a Big Conservative Tent. We want your vote. We’ll be glad to have you. If we can fix your problem with a conservative solution, we’ll see what we can do. If your problem requires giving up conservatism to fix, well, it is a Conservative Tent.

There is no ideological litmus test. We accept the help of Communists as long as they support Conservatism in whatever small way they can. Example, Eric Flint, SF writer for Baen, is or was a Trotskyite, but from his writing, I suspect he supports the Second Amendment. I’d be glad to have him talk to Republicans about the glories of rifle ownership. How many Republicans cheered Guiliani’s speech at the convention…probably upwards of 95% of them.

But we can’t let Rockefeller Republicans run things like they have because they lose. If we have to tear apart the party to get their deathgrip off the steering wheel, so be it. We’re headed toward a cliff anyways. It’d be hard to get worse.