Infrastucture Spending Is Just As Bad As Energy Subsidy Spending

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – There’s another thing here that many people do not consider, and that is that when government directs public moneys and decides they’re going to use eminent domain or whatever method they’re going to use to acquire property so that they can build roads, you don’t think that there is a political consideration there for where that road goes?  Oh, please!  Of course there are.  Is there any reason?  Let’s bring Andrew Gruss in here for just a moment and get some real commentary on this.  The greatest highway infrastructure project in the history of man is four miles from where you currently are. Check out today’s audio and transcript for more…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  There’s another thing here that many people do not consider, and that is that when government directs public moneys and decides they’re going to use eminent domain or whatever method they’re going to use to acquire property so that they can build roads, you don’t think that there is a political consideration there for where that road goes?  Oh, please!  As Thomas Jefferson says in What Lincoln Killed: Episode I, “Pu-lease!”  Of course there are.  Is there any reason?  Let’s bring Andrew Gruss in here for just a moment and get some real commentary on this.  The greatest highway infrastructure project in the history of man is four miles from where you currently are.  Are you familiar with it?

AG:  I-95?

Mike:  And all the other 95s.  There’s a I-95, a 695, a 295, a 395, a 495, I-95 extension.  Does it ever end?  Does it ever end?  Has it ever ended in your lifetime?  Have they ever stopped screwing and mucking up with the 95?  Have they?

AG:  I don’t believe so.

Mike:  Okay.  It continues till today.  Let me ask you a question.  Have the traffic jams gotten any better?

AG:  Not at all.

Mike:  This is a grand example here of government planning.  What if that road had to be paid for by people that used it?  I’m not talking about people that casually use it, I’m talking about people that have to get from Point A to Point B.  What if it took them two hours and ten minutes to go seven miles like it does on 95?  Would the company that ran that road be around for very long?

AG:  Probably not.

Mike:  Or would alternate methods of transportation be found?  Would alternate routes be found, promoted, built and then profited from?  Yes, there would be some that would not work, but then the market would liquidate the bad investment and you would not have politicians making decisions that the market ought to make.  Folks, you have got to get over this infatuation with the infallibility of government.  The only mechanism known to man that can regulate mammoth amounts of money like this with any efficiency whatsoever is the market.  You know what?  You won’t have the massive amounts of money poured into it.  Let me give you an example.  [mocking] “Oh, come on, Mike, that’ll never work.  That’s pie in the sky, Ludwig von Mises crap.  Not even Hayek would say that, Mike.”  Murray Rothbard would, and there are some other great minds out there that would.

Let me give you an example of this.  NASA boasts and brags about the tens of billions of dollars or hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that they spend through JPL and the rest of these space bases and launch facilities and monitoring facilities that they have to put this satellite here and land the Mars rover there and all the other things.  It is fascinating stuff.  It ought to tell you that it would be equally and probably even more fascinating if somebody actually had to pay for it with the purpose of making a profit on it.  You may have noticed that those little shuttlecraft, those suborbital vehicles that are going up into space and currently are using some sort of rocketry held over from NASA, but they are developing their own, come in at a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle.

Google this: Ansari Prize.  You will find that great entrepreneurial minds with their own money, like Bill Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, is involved in the Ansari Prize.  The most famous of all the private entrepreneurs, although I suspect he is at least somewhat of a shill and a benefactor of corporatism and oligarchy, Sir Richard Branson has invested his own money.  The point is that space travel will ultimately, and if it’s going to become something that is commercially viable, will ultimately happen because the market makes it so.  The market will figure out a way.

Look, you just can’t spend $60 million every time you want to get someone 17,434 miles above the Earth into a geostationary orbit or whatever the speed is, or 23,500 per hour to get them out of orbit so they can go to a planet and go do what?  What is actually accomplished by studying the surface of Mars?  We don’t get any oil out of it.  There’s no gold coming back.  We’re not getting any lifesaving — [mocking] “Yeah, but Mike, it sparks the human imagination.”  For $3 billion?  I can think of some authors that can spark the human imagination for about $35.  It’s just all an idle expense of resources that are precious.  We seem to think there’s a never-ending pool of resources.  That is the arrogance and conceit of an empire.

End Mike Church Show Transcript