“Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
Clarence Oddbody, It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946, written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling to a story by Philip Van Doren Stern.
Earlier this week, SpaceX made history. Again.
Back in 2008, the company had launched the Falcon 1 into orbit —a big deal in the Space Age, previously dominated by governments.
Blue Origin, which is the baby of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has been providing Elon Musk’s SpaceX some stiff competition. A few weeks ago, Blue Origin sent up the New Shepard rocket — and returned it to earth vertically.
This week, SpaceX pulled ahead, sending its Falcon 9 up beyond New Shepard’s suborbital heights, putting eleven (count ’em: 11) satellites into orbit . . . and returning to touch down safely onto dry land — on the launch pad — vertically.
Just like we imagined when we (well, some of us oldsters) were young, before we witnessed Mercury and Apollo splashdowns.
Back in 2012, when I wrote about SpaceX — and NASA’s outsourcing of launches — I called it progress. One reader worried about the whole thing, though: “A spy satellite is still a spy satellite even if some telecom conglomerate puts it in space.” He was afraid of privatizing tyranny. That would be bad, but it doesn’t seem to apply to this week’s new satellites . . . unless M2M (machine-to-machine) Internet devices mean something different than what I understand them to be.
In any case, costs have been contained: while NASA’s Space Shuttle was also reusable, it cost about half a billion bucks per launch, which, we’re told, is “about eight times the current cost of a Falcon 9.”
Free enterprise: delivering the goods at a fraction of the cost.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On December 24, 1818, the first performance of “Silent Night” took place in the church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria. Father Joseph Mohr had written the lyrics some time earlier, commissioning nearby schoolteacher and organist, Franz Xavier Gruber, to compose a melody appropriate for guitar accompaniment. It is one of the world’s most recognizable songs, and a favorite Christmas carol.
Christopher Buckley, author of the satirical novels Thank You For Smoking and Supreme Courtship, was born on Christmas Eve, 1952
“The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you’re gonna hear about it!”
The character Frank Constanza, Seinfeld, “The Strike,” Season 9, Episode 10 (December 18, 1997), written by Alec Berg & Jeff Schaffer & Dan O’Keefe — “Festivus” is the made-up holiday serving as an alternative to Christmas.
First, Hillary lied. She said that ISIS was using Trump in terrorism recruitment videos. The Donald responded with contemptuous ridicule, using a vulgar word for her 2008 defeat by Barack Obama.
Then, the Democratic Party presidential contender got all teary-eyed and said we had to treat each other with more respect, be nicer.
This is presidential politics?
Mrs. Hillary Clinton and Mr. Donald Trump are both addicted to telling whoppers. Their “stretchers” are now the everyday stuff of our nightly news.
Mrs. Clinton’s fact-less charge that Trump was being used in recruitment videos is all the more ridiculous considering that Mr. Clinton does star in such a video. Maybe she meant merely that Mr. Trump’s call for barring Muslim immigration will help ISIS paint America as anti-Muslim, telling the tall tale because, well, it “ seems true.” Even if it isn’t.
In this, she differs not a whit from Mr. Trump, who not too long ago “remembered” “seeing” “thousands” of “Muslims” in “New Jersey” celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 — a video he cannot produce, either.
Politicians hyperbolize from bigotry to factoid all the time. What’s new is Trump’s foul calumny, in response, and Clinton’s painting of Trump as a bully for belittling her. That’s not how I remember politics. It seems new to adult debate.
But it isn’t new to our experience. It’s children bickering on the playground, then whining and lying all the way to Teacher. Or even Home.
Responsible adults don’t believe every charge lodged by little boys and little girls.
Like Donny and Hillary.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On December 23, 1783, George Washington resigned as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland.
“The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” Aesthetic Papers, 1849 (republished in a variety of titles, including On the Duty of Civil Disobedience).
Subsidize something, and you tend to get more of it.
But wait, what if you subsidize demand for something, but don’t really allow (or continue to disallow) increased supply?
Then prices for that something go way up.
This is elementary economics — nothing controversial about it.
Except that politicians and bureaucrats who make public policy tend not to acknowledge this aspect of reality when they propose subsidies. Instead, they expect praise for their “heroic” and “caring” program of destruction.
They need to be educated. But, alas, all this applies best to college education. How does one educate the educators?
A new study, which reliable economists tell me is “sophisticated,” finds that the bulk of recent college tuition price inflation can, indeed, be directly linked to the federal government’s loan subsidies.
This study makes for some opaque reading, alas: “Essentially, demand shocks lead to higher college costs and more debt, and in the absence of higher labor market returns, more loan default inevitably occurs.” Yikes.
The college education bubble has been much talked-about for years, at least amongst skeptics of government policy. But in hushed tones — the big fear, here, is that a bursting of the bubble will lead to — who knows what? I mean, who-knows-what policy reaction.
Probably just more government subsidy and control. And even higher tuition still. Double yikes.
Thankfully, while the brick-and-mortar higher education institutions suck up more and more government-backed money, the Internet is enabling some great alternatives. The future, I think, does not belong to the university system as we have known it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“By far the most important of all the conditions, under which the production of material commodities goes broadly forward, is liberty of action on the part of the individual; because, wherever such liberty is conceded, association and invention and all other needful conditions follow right along by laws of natural sequence.”
Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy, 1891.
On December 22, 1989, Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife fled Bucharest with a helicopter as protesters erupted in cheers.