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National Planetary Exploration Car Wash and Bake Sale
An anonymous reader writes "To attract media and Congressional attention to the deep NASA planetary exploration cuts proposed to take place October 1, and the need to restore the planetary budget to present or higher levels, a National Planetary Exploration Car Wash and Bake Sale is being planned for June 9th. Organizations already involved include planetary groups at many universities, research institutions, and Moon Express (Google Lunar X Prize)."
Compassion is a ridiculously easy system to game to your advantage. Worse than that, once it gets settled, only those who game the system can get anything out of it.
Look at both history and the way begging goes in the poorer parts of the modern world. You can find professional beggars who put more effort into looking desperate than they do into finding work, even to the extent of crippling themselves, removing limbs, tearing off skin to fake skin diseases, and so on.
There are also huge biases built in. Women get more charity than men. It's easier to find charity money for starving kids than it is to prevent them from starving in the first place. Cancer victims are fashionable, tuberculosis victims are ignored.
I simply do not believe it is possible for pure charity to be fair.
I don't know much about the US welfare system, so it might well be a complete disaster, but in general the state welfare model can be made blind to all this bias, and in most of the developed world, that's exactly the point of it.
What's tragic is how many people here equate liberty with money. "The Road to Serfdom" is going to end up as a how-to manual.