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European Scientists Make a Case For a Return To the Moon
MarkWhittington writes "While the official target of NASA's space exploration program remains exploring Earth approaching asteroids, the case for a return to the moon has been made from a variety of quarters. The most recent attempt to make a case for the moon is in a paper, titled Back to the Moon: The Scientific Rationale for Resuming Lunar Surface Exploration, soon to be published in the journal Planetary and Space Science."
One way or another humans will render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. Sooner or later.
The only way to give humans a chance to survive our own suicidal idiocy is to colonize other places. The Moon is the obvious necessary step towards that.
There's plenty of other reasons to make it worthwhile until the Earth is done. But let's get started already. There's a chance that spreading somewhere else might take the pressure off and postpone the inevitable down here.
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make install -not war
Exactly, and that wealth either has to be created by fraud (printing money) or by theft of those people creating real wealth (taxation).
We need to focus less on "jobs" and more on producing wealth. Creating jobs means nothing, we need to focus on creating true wealth.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Is sir of the opinion that /. ever had standards?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Taxation is agreeing that some things are best for the state to manage and paying for those from everyone.
Really? So I can agree that those things aren't best for the state to manage and not pay for them?
No, I didn't think so.
You need to focus more on jobs, which will create wealth.
Jobs do not create wealth. Jobs are a cost. If you think jobs create wealth, you should be eliminating all technology and promoting a Pol Pot-style 'back to the land' movement.
Cutting spending is creating a spiral of destruction in its wake that is destroying wealth left right and centre.
Cutting government spending frees up money for private uses. Sucking money out of the real economy to spend on useless government non-jobs makes you poor.
The problem is that the governments which have had bloated borrow and spend policies are also typically the same countries that have been pushing regulations that have destroyed much of the private industry in their nation. So they're fscked either way.
Borrowing money isn't fraud, but printing money (which is the logical consequence of borrowing more money than a government can pay back) is fraud because it devalues the worth of each currency unit, a bit like deciding to say a pound is 400 grams and not ~453 grams, so everyone thinks they are getting a pound with ~453 grams but instead getting a pound with a lot less weight.
The dictionary defines taxation as "A compulsory contribution to state revenue" the dictionary defines theft as "the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another".
Theft is compulsory, so is taxation. Both theft and taxation happen with a threat of force. Really the only difference is one is a guy in a T-Shirt with a baseball bat and a pistol and the other is a guy with a suit with a book of "laws".
If taxation was not compulsory (as in, you would pay for what you use and nothing more, just like any other service) it would not be theft. But it isn't.
Jobs do not create wealth. If I pay you to sit on your butt all day and do nothing (and call it unemployment benefits or whatever), you have a job, but you are creating no wealth. We could create more jobs if we got rid of ATMs and replaced them with physical tellers, but we'd lose wealth. The government produces no wealth of its own, everything it produces is with stolen revenue, cutting theft does not destroy wealth. Europe has been suicidal since the second world war when it decided it was going to start punishing wealth creators by increasing taxes and support those who produce no wealth of their own. Overtime those who produce wealth naturally moved outside of Europe where they could keep more of their wealth while those who produce no wealth of their own demanded more of the wealth. It is exactly what caused the collapse of the Roman empire: a worthless currency, expensive wars, a mass exodus of wealth producers, a welfare state and a large bureaucracy.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.