Space policy: Rent seekers to the left of me, rent seekers to the right...

...the reality is that if we define the government's role broadly to make our lives better, the state will be enormous and rent seekers of every political stripe will come out of the woodwork.  The only way to not be looted is to minimize the state.  Period.

Staffers for California’s Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein were no doubt nonplussed to discover that their bosses had been praised by the Tea Party on Monday. It’s all of a piece of the political bizarro world in which space policy has been immersed for the last year and a half, ever since the Obama administration canceled the disastrous Constellation program in favor of a more commercial approach, and the response of many supposed conservatives in Congress was to demand a “public option.” . . . Which all goes to show (as we’ve seen for the last year and a half) that space policy is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and it is driven primarily by rent seeking, not a desire to open up space to humanity. As long as space policy remains unimportant, it will continue to be subject to the petty politics of those whose states and districts benefit from the jobs created, even as wealth is destroyed. But the good news is that this may delay things sufficiently long that an expensive, unnecessary rocket never gets built at all.