starship-design: Lawmen, Taxmen and Bureaucrats

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

OPINION SPACE

Lawmen, Taxmen and Bureaucrats
The Spacefaring Web 2.17


by John Carter McKnight
Scottsdale - Sep 11, 2002

Technocratic infatuation with the state-directed master plan helped smother
the first Space Age. Today, the nascent second Space Age faces challenges
not just from NASA's continued addiction to central planning and control,
but from groups of well-meaning reformers within the space community. Like
their governmental counterparts, they want space development, but without
uncertainty, disorder and upheaval. Without bold gambling and creative chaos
there is no frontier, and the greatest value of expanding into space is
lost.

Technocracy was the primary ideology of the Industrial Age. In East and West
alike, it was widely believed that economic and social activity was so
complex as to require a master plan for coordination. Everything, from steel
production to medical care, required a governmental system of rules and
regulations in order to be licensed to occur. Space, as an outgrowth of the
military and of heavy industry, the two most managed activities, was deeply
imbued with the technocratic ethos.

In its day, the Plan was effective enough, transforming a Soviet Union of
peasants briefly into a superpower and enabling the United States -
briefly - to put men on the Moon. What it achieved in single-pointed efforts
it lost in failures of coordination and sustainability. It proved
increasingly ineffective as advances in communications technology rendered
the "manager" a redundant intermediary.

NASA failed to evolve when its political and cultural environment changed
after Apollo 11. Its ongoing adherence to grandiose mega-engineering plans,
cost-plus contracting and reckless accounting has smacked of the voodoo
ritual, an attempt to reanimate the corpse of technocracy's glory days.

Using the very methods that industries and governments worldwide were
beginning to abandon, NASA failed to produce a viable product with the Space
Shuttle, which has never come anywhere near delivering the outcomes touted
for it.

Fresh from that failure, the agency re-enacted the same rituals and got the
same results - with much greater delay and expense - for the International
Space Station. Next week at the World Space Congress, NASA will release its
"NexT" master plan for government-only space construction efforts. Any bets
on the outcome of that?

Along with the all-encompassing, over-promising central plan, NASA has
repeatedly tried to limit access to space. It attempted to force a satellite
launch monopoly with the Shuttle, but the Challenger disaster allowed
Arianespace to stage a market coup and drove the US Air Force to fund a new
generation of expendable launch vehicles to ensure its own access.

NASA later strongarmed the Russians into abandoning Mir as the price for
access to the ISS (which has proved illusory), and was hostile to the point
of hysteria over the first paying space travelers.

This urge to control is, unfortunately, the technocratic reflex. For the
planner, the greatest fear is chaos, the greatest need, control. The
critical economic role, the planner feels, is performed not by the producer,
nor by the consumer, but by their intermediary and master, the planner.

It is simply unimaginable that beneficial outcomes could occur otherwise:
the hand of undirected market forces is not just invisible, it is
inconceivable. Where the entrepreneur sees a vibrant marketplace, the
planner sees a terrifying chaos. The land beyond the plan is a place clearly
marked "here there be dragons."

Others call that place the frontier. It may be the metaphorical frontier of
a new market yet un-dominated by sclerotic companies whose days of real
innovation are generations past. Or it could be the geographic frontier, the
land beyond the reach of the lawman, the taxman and the bureaucrat.

People of many political persuasions speak glowingly of the value of a
frontier. When they do, often they are envisioning an idealized American
West, one of taciturn cowboys and sturdy pioneer farmers. The more real
West, of vigilante justice, self-governing mining camps, legalized
prostitution and brutal strike-breaking - that West is a different matter.
Conservatives, with a romantic attachment to the past, denounce those images
as the focus of cynics and dissidents.

The technocrat, however, believes that we can have our frontier cake and eat
it too - that we can get "reasonable" - watch out for that word - economic
expansion without boomtowns, without robber barons, without bloodshed over
working conditions and property rights - if we just start with the right
plan.

Yet both economic growth and those sturdy pioneers are the fruits of chaos -
or, to use a synonym, freedom. The frontier is attractive because it offers
the chance to make a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) killing.

Those who value safety and certainty live in their parents' hometown and
keep their money in banks. Real growth is the product of risk, of gambling
life and capital on the prospect of "unreasonable," "unfair," "piratical"
gain, versus complete loss. If the full safety net - or noose - of lawmen,
taxmen and bureaucrats is present, there is no risk, and no concomitant
return.

The frontier offers more than spectacular economic growth. Only there is any
real social or political innovation, rather than incremental tinkering,
possible. Democracy did not evolve gradually out of Europe's absolute
monarchies, nor was it provided for in the colonizing nations' master plans.
It was tried and tested on the frontier.

What worked and endured was imported back to the Old World. What failed was
discarded, sometimes violently. Similarly, technological frontiers - birth
control and cheap telecommunications, for example - forced changes to law
and custom that were driven by experiment and experience rather than design.

A spacefaring civilization will not be the fruit of NASA Five-Year Plans,
nor of incremental progress by Big Aerospace. It will be the product of an
open frontier or it will come not at all.

The American frontier was not settled by the government, with cowboys and
farmers trotting behind an army of county clerks and safety inspectors.
Restless explorers, military scouts, resource speculators, malcontents who
couldn't abide the strictures of ossifying Eastern cities - they were first
to the West. Hobbyists, hackers and pornographers pioneered the Internet
long before AOL made it family-friendly.

That means that our future in space will not be built by people that the
planner, the guaranteed-return investor and the moral traditionalist will
easily approve of. It will be built by dropouts, crooks, pirates, gamblers
and misfits, same as any other frontier. And it will be built only in the
absence of laws, regulations and government plans made here on Earth. Their
presence, so reassuring to the cost-plus contractor and prissy schoolmarm,
is anathema to innovators in business, politics and culture.

It is widely argued, and correctly so, that uncertainty in property rights
and an absence of means of settling disputes undermine economic development.
This argument is put forward by many of the space advocates who back one
plan or another for shipping lawmen, taxmen and bureaucrats out into the
black. The argument is true, but misinterpreted.

In settled societies, property rights and a fair, speedy and final means of
adjudicating disputes are critical to continued growth. In settled
societies. Establishing such systems prior to the natural end of the
frontier period short-circuits the whole process.

Technocratic approaches - permits, licenses, land grants and the like - pick
winners and losers by fiat. Contracts and privileges are awarded rather than
earned. They go not to the invisible, incomprehensible entrepreneur, but to
the established risk-averse government contractor, the one reassuringly
incapable of upsetting the status quo. Competition is for favor in the
ministry or legislature, rather than for mindshare or market share.

Technocracy is simply modern colonialism, the exploitation of the new for
the benefit of the old established elites. Frontiers build infrastructure
for the benefit of the locals who take the risks. The Spanish gold rush
impoverished Central America to enable lavish expenditures by courtiers; the
California gold rush built San Francisco into a world-class city and turned
the inspiration of one merchant drawn to the frontier, Levi Straus, into the
most popular consumer item in the world. It also gave rise to seediness,
decadence and violence, the price of freedom. No free lunch, as Heinlein
said.

Which is why the well-meaning codes written by some space advocates are as
much of a threat to the opening of a space frontier as are NASA's efforts at
bureaucratic strangulation. The space advocacy community has its share of
technocrats, of course.

Many are veterans of NASA or of government contractors, deeply imprinted
with the ideology of managerial control. Some just fear the chaos of social
and economic dynamism, feeling the same trepidation at the prospect of a
space frontier that protestors feel for globalization or genetically
modified foodstuffs.

Some just wish things could be a little neater, a little more genteel. Some
are genuinely looking to establish favorable conditions for investment and
political viability but overreach in their concessions.

With respect to all these space planning initiatives, we should ask: does
this plan encourage real economic growth and cultural change, or is it an
attempt to extend the status quo a few miles farther past the atmosphere? We
have plenty of status quo here on Earth - it hardly seems necessary to go to
great expense to vacuum-pack it.

Space governance? Cops and regulators first, then "reasonable" prospectors.
No frontier. Land grants? The already-wealthy will force up prices in a
speculative market, driving out the entrepreneur and ensuring the continued
dominance of current financial or political powers. Codes of ethics? New
industries are built by ruthless, megalomaniac robber barons. The meek will
inherit the Earth, once the pirates get us into space. Grand plans?
Single-point efforts lacking a broad-based infrastructure - pyramids rather
than cities. NASA is building enough of those, thank you.

Technological frontiers come once a generation at best, and are limited in
their scope. Social frontiers, places beyond the reach of lawmen, taxmen and
bureaucrats, unmapped territories filled with dragons for the timid, can be
found these days only in story.

Rather than asteroidal ore or Lunar ice, those spaces, and the hope they
offer for vibrant growth and beneficial, if messy, change, are the most
precious space resource. Their development is the standard by which space
planning should be judged.

The Spacefaring Web is a biweekly column © 2002 by John Carter McKnight, an
Advocate of the Space Frontier Foundation. Views expressed herein are
strictly the author's and do not necessarily represent Foundation policy.
Archives are available.