Keep your laws off my asteroid!
Alex Tabarrok is concerned about an asteroid hitting the earth, and he thinks that government should take on the problem. Asteroid collision prevention is, he says, one of the few "public goods" the he supports.
But do we want government involved in this business at all?
Justin Raimando wrote a good piece on this, arguing that we do not, a few years back in The Free Market.
As the Raimando article suggests, why would we trust government with the all important task of protecting the earth from complete decimation when it can't even perform the most simple tasks, like effectively protecting us from ordinary street criminals, or terrorists?
Indeed, we should want government to not undertake this activity at all, even if it is already engaged in space observation and exploration, and has all of the nuclear weapons that could be useful in averting an asteroid catastrophe.
For government to meddle in this matter would forestall potentially effective private solutions, as government grants would direct research toward the type of collision prevention techniques that the government, in its wisdom, thinks are best. Scientists would stop focusing on how to best prevent asteroid collisions, and start focusing on how to carry out the government's specific ideas about collision prevention.
When the asteroid came, if the government solution wasn't ready or didn't work (if you can imagine such a thing, from the folks at NASA), humanity would be out of luck.
It may be hard to think about how private resources would come together to prevent an asteroid collision, but given humans' shared desire to avoid obliteration by an asteroid, is it so hard to imagine that they would, one way or another, especially once concerned scientists begin making the public, and private foundations, aware of the problem?
Isn't it much more difficult to imagine government undertaking the project without making a bad situation worse, as usual?
I know who I'd sooner trust.
Comments (5)
Far more asteroids miss the Earth than hit it; the greater danger isn't from government incompetence not preventing a collision, but in causing one.
If governments arrogate the responsibility of asteroid diversion to themselves, then the danger of the use of asteroids as WMDs grows exponentially, due to both the lack of competent private asteroid collision avoidance systems caused by governmental appropriation of the resources needed to develop them (as subsidized public transportation crowds out private mass transit), and the propensity of governments for mass-murder.
This danger may lead to governments forbidding private entities from even attempting such development - which will make us all the more defenseless, as on 9/11, if terrorists in the far future decide to use such weapons.
Published: April 20, 2004 8:30 AM
Asteroid defense would involve monetizing and pooling the relatively minor risk of harm from an asteroid, and pooling the aggregated funds for some kind of combined effort. Isn't this exactly what insurance companies do? Anarcho-capitalists in the past have argued that the "public good" of territorial defense would be carried out by associations of insurance companies. I wouldn't be surprised if David Friedman has already addressed the issue of asteroid defense in similar terms.
Published: April 20, 2004 10:02 AM
The insurance possibility occurred to me, except that you can't insure against the extinction of humanity, for obvious reasons.
Whether insurance companies would find it efficient to pursue nuclear weapons and means of shooting them into space to avert lesser asteroid disasters, I don't know.
Published: April 20, 2004 11:18 AM
Well, no, you can't really insure something like an asteroid crashing into the earth. But stopping the extinction of the human race is a profitable venture; and there might be the possibility of several insurance companies forming R&D pacts to address the 'rogue asteroid' issue.
I don't know. It doesn't seem to be that big of a problem to me.
Published: April 20, 2004 9:24 PM
actually friedman is against using insurance companies if you read Machinery of Freedom
Published: April 23, 2004 3:16 AM