Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Recently, the Portuguese socialist who is currently the secretary general of the United Nations that agree to recognise one another lambasted people who actually create wealth for going into space. There are so many things about this nonsensical person speaking on this topic that I was unable to resist composing an open letter to him.

What He Said

“At the same time, another disease is spreading in our world today: a malady of mistrust,” he said, after mentioning the scamdemic and the climate non-crisis. That included, he said, when people “see billionaires joyriding to space while millions go hungry on earth.”

First, billionaires create more jobs than the UN ever has, and often without having “peacekeepers” trade food aid for sex with minors, to mention a continuing UN scandal. Second, socialist governments in Portugal and elsewhere have caused millions to go hungry so he has some nerve castigating billionaires when it is his own policies that are harmful.

Third, clearly the billionaires should be free to spend money as they see fit, since they have proven their ability to earn more. It hardly makes sense for the UN head mf in charge to complain about tourism. Were the same billionaires spending the exact same amount in Portugal at tourist spots, the man would have said nothing. But because he hates the thought of anyone getting away from his world disorder or, gasp, starting a new country somewhere he cannot control, he heaps his disdain upon them.

Which is not to say that the United Nations represents the nations and peoples of the world. Far from it. As Alvin and Heidi Toffler pointed out in their 1993 classic War and Anti-war, there are thousands of native sovereignties that the UN refuses to recognise. About two thousand countries would exist on the continent of Africa alone if it were not for the Berlin conference of 1885 that drew the borders of every country in Africa to suit European “great" powers. Portugal was at that conference. The only African delegation seated was from Ethiopia which was capable of defeating Italy that same decade. But does this fatuous nincompoop acknowledge Portugal's rôle in this perfidy? He was, for a time, prime minister of Portugal, ruining its economy. Yet he never apologised for the terrible things done by his country during the Scramble for Africa. Go figure.

The Space Frontier

Like many readers of L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise, I grew up knowing that the space frontier has endless resources to make life better here on Earth. The late Jerry Pournelle once wrote, “It's raining soup out there. Grab a bucket.”

How do we know? Goodness, cousin, we’ve known since Tsiolkovsky's day, roughly at the time of the aforementioned Berlin conference that space resources dwarf those of Earth. In the early 1970s, Dr. Gerard O'Neill illustrated how much better off we'd be if we used lunar and asteroidal materials to develop human settlements in space, build solar power satellites and move mining and refining beyond the atmosphere.

Would the UN do anything but stand in the way of such endeavours? It never has. Indeed both the 1967 Outer Space treaty and the UN treaty on the moon and other celestial bodies are communist claptrap of the first order. Billionaires, on the other hand, seem to see profit as the key to long-term success in space ventures, something the grand man from the UN refuses to accept.

Which saddens me. When I think of my personal friends in the space business whose lives were too soon over to see the era of space tourism we have now, I feel a sense of loss that I once explained in a poem. “On the Death of Friends”

There is such a stark contrast between the old guard communists like the secretary general and the new wave of decentralising and freedom enthusiastic developers of the future. Like many bad ideas backed by billions stolen by bankers, communism has entirely outlived its supposed usefulness. It was so provably worthless by the 1970s, so deadly and so inept, that leading communists came up with postmodernism to obliterate standards so they could pretend their failures didn't matter.

The billionaires should go on making things better. The communist in chief at the UN should apologise, resign in shame, and forfeit all his wealth to his victims in Portugal and worldwide.

I have studiously avoided mentioning his name because he would most likely enjoy seeing his name in print. And also because I remember L. Neil not being willing to name certain bad persons and I feel like an homage is due to our late lamented friend.

We deserve a better world which is not saddled with a nasty United Nations and a bunch of elderly communists who seek to destroy what they never understood . Happily, many tens of millions of us are building that future, not only on this planet but also, soon, on many others as well as in free space.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, actor, entrepreneur, dancer, and coder who has worn many hats. The hat he wears now is worn, but versatile. Jim lives in a wilderness 9 miles South from Eureka Springs in the Arkansas Ozarks where he works to build Freedom Land. Find him at freedomlanddao.com and Twitter.com/planetaryjim among other places.