Gil says:

It's ironic that this post comes immediately after one in which The World correctly denounces enforced treatment of spurious diseases by saying: 'This breach of human rights is casually justified as being “for their own good”.' It seems to me that The World is guilty of the same thing here against those who would prefer to pursue their own goals rather than ours.

It seems to me that that analogy only holds on the basis of some assumptions which I, for one, doubt are true.

One is that the overall burden of taxation (including inflation and other economic effects of government) on the American people will be higher as a result of this project than it would have been otherwise. But I would expect that the total level of taxation is, and will be for the foreseeable future, determined almost independently of the final destination of the diverted resources. In short, the government takes whatever it can get away with, and it spends it on whatever it judges best. Though the totals are linked by the inexorable laws of arithmetic, and though popular forms of expenditure do have a slight tendency to make taxation in general more politically acceptable than unpopular ones, there is no mechanism within government that links particular spending with particular taxation. Indeed, there can't be: money is fungible. Comparing, as you do, the Mars project with the invention of a new metaphorical disease and the consequent violations of children's rights, it might likewise be argued that children who behave defiantly were going to be punished anyway, so the invention of the new disease and new forms of punishment has caused no net harm. Well, I doubt that that is factually true, but if it were true then surely it would indeed diminish the force of The World's objection to such practices. But either way, my point here is that your “guilty” verdict against The World depends on your making a certain (counter)factual assumption about what would otherwise have happened to the resources now destined for the Mars project. If you accept that that assumption is in any way questionable, you must accept that it is at least as questionable that the Mars project is immoral.

A second assumption is, in effect, that the Mars project is not economically viable: that it will not in the long run make a sufficient return on the investment. I am sure it will, and I think you are too, Gil. But implicitly you are assuming it will not, by characterising the government's action as being “against those who would prefer to pursue their own goals rather than ours”. For though, admittedly, any scheme funded by taxation will in some vague (because of fungibility) sense force opponents of the project to contribute to it, one could equally well say that a refusal to go to Mars would be forcing Mars-oriented taxpayers to divert their precious Mars funds to the purchase of canes for schools, or whatever other function of government strikes you as the most foul. And if the Mars project is, in fact, profitable while the canes project is, in fact, destructive of resources, then the latter interpretation is more accurate.

I also don't accept that the Mars project will tend to divert private funds away from space by being more exciting. There are plenty of exciting things to do in space, and if anything, each of them draws more attention to the others by making us into a more spaceward-looking culture.

So in summary, I think that “morally questionable” was a fair way of characterising the means by which the human race will now begin its historic move outwards into the cosmos. The move itself, and President Bush's decision to initiate it under government auspices, is not wrong, but right.

This is not a case of ‘the end justifying the means’. Government is not the means by which we are going to Mars. The means is human creativity. Government is the obstacle. But under existing political circumstances, the choice facing the President was whether it was to become a relatively minor obstacle, causing inefficiency (and being morally questionable),
or an obstacle that would remain insuperable for decades or perhaps centuries. Which would be very wrong.