Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Several weeks ago I almost wrote an editorial on my disappointment with William Shatner—AKA Captain James Tiberius Kirk of Star Trek fame over an article I stumbled across in which it was sadly revealed that he’d given up on the hope of the Star Trek future and fallen into a dystopian pit of despair over the issue of climate change. What a monumental failure of a man who was once the iconic champion of that positive vision of a future where humanity uses technological innovation to create a post scarcity society in which poverty, injustice and war (at least as far as life on Planet Earth is concerned) have been vanquished and we go on to seek out peaceful contact with new life and new civilizations and boldly go where no man has gone before.

I’ve been a life long Star Trek fan that embodied the progressive vision of Gene Roddenberry in my childhood days. A time long before my political sentiments started to evolve toward where they are now and right before much of science fiction abandoned that sort of optimistic utopianism in favor of dystopian doom and gloom and immolation of technological progress and western civilization. That was the saving grace of the Star Trek franchise that makes up for underlying anticapitalist sentiment of its creator and many of the cast and the fan base. So is often the case in science fiction. At least they embraced idealism and a vision that the future can and damned well ought to be better than the past and an improvement over life in the present day.

Back in the day when people complained that we must solve our problems on Earth first and save the slums it was Trek fans and some members of the cast from the original series who argued that we need to get people out of the slums and on their way to the stars. Like the old Air Force recruitment slogan “Aim High”! Or like the president of the late Pittsburgh L-5 Society who I interviewed for a college journalism class project said “Our major problem is thinking too small”. Which is essentially the self defeating Limits to Growth mindset promoted by the Club of Rome and other left wing think tanks back in the day when “Small is Beautiful” was vogue (except of course when it comes to Big Government). But I digress.

Trek fans and members of the original cast and science fiction writers and fandom in general rolled up their sleeves and rose to the occasion alongside members of various space advocacy groups to oppose the ill conceived Moon Treaty sponsored by the Soviet Union that would have made private enterprise in space illegal. Jimmy Carter probably would have signed into law had the Senate ratified it. Thanks to a lot of letters and phone calls it didn’t happen. Ditto for proposal by the Reagan Administration to pull the plug on the Voyager space probes before they even reached the two outermost planets—Uranus and Neptune! Which would have been a monumental waste and loss of opportunity to expand scientific knowledge by penny wise dollar foolish federal government.

Star Trek has long been lambasted by people who consider it “bad science fiction”. I even find the idea of money becoming obsolete to be hopelessly naive and counter productive. Even full blown socialist systems like the Soviet Union had a currency. But there is no denying that some form of post scarcity society is possible and will be a quantum improvement over what we have now as that is over life 100 years ago. Some of the script writers in the original series as well as later theatrical episodes and series like The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager were good at illustrating that. In the real world we will probably never do away with money or have Starships with faster than light warp drive but we already have interplanetary and and can probably someday achieve interstellar travel at a modest 10 percent the speed of light. That is if we don’t give up today.

Last year during the election I came across a site by Trek fans who were stumping for the candidacy of Joe Biden and democrats in general: https://treknews.net/2020/10/06/patrick-stewart-kate-mulgrew-george-takei-joe-biden-event/

“What the hell is wrong with you all”! my mind screamed! Don’t they realize what they are getting in bed with? A political movement that may profess many of their progressive visions and values but has a notorious track record of wanting to shut down space travel and high technology in general. Pretty much everything you would need to get close to the kind of future envisioned in Star Trek. Not to mention some pretty illiberal stuff that a real progressive liberal would find as bad as would any real Libertarian.

And then William Shatner: https://www.bigissue.com/culture/film/william-shatner-humanity-wont-survive-to-reach-a-star-trek-future/

Not so long ago he too was lamenting and handwringing over the likelihood we were going to destroy the habitability of our planet with anthropogenic global warming and he seemed ready to give up on the Star Trek future. That was an even greater disappointment to me than when the astronomer Robert Burnham (author of the 3 volume celestial handbook which I have) trashed the L-5 society for wanting to forsake Earth. William Shatner. Captain Kirk of all people forsaking the very thing that made him so loved by millions, if not billions. At a time when the world needs positive vision more than ever he was becoming like Al Gore and the atheist pastors.

Well there apparently still is hope. Because a couple weeks ago I learned that “Captain Kirk” was going UP THERE! To the edge of space in a capsule being launched by the Blue Origins entrepreneur Jeff Bezos. A man who recently garnered a lot of negative publicity from left wing ideologues who savagely demonized him in their typical class warfare rants. I forgot about that for a while with the limelight focused on Shatner; age 90 who was about to become the oldest person to fly to space breaking the record of Senator John Glenn the first American to orbit Earth in 1962 and flew again on a space shuttle mission in 1998 at age 77.

God bless both of them!

We all have our faults and dark moments when we get overwhelmed by despair and defeatism. Especially in times like these when we have people in power promoting such as an attack on our very way of life. It was a golden opportunity for Mr Shatner to overcome his burnout and redeem himself by going into space and taking advantage of the opportunity to restore his faith and the faith of others in the human potential by using his trip as a bully pulpit for some much needed enlightenment on what good the commercialization of space travel can do to enhance the survival and prosperity of the human species.

The way I see it- a privately funded space program with people like William Shatner as paying customers is bringing about development of better rockets and other alternatives for getting stuff and people into orbit—like maybe a space elevator going to an orbital ring city 200 miles up. From where you can catch a shuttle to an O’Neill cylinder in the Earth/Moon liberation points or to Mars or the Asteroid Belt , the outer planets or even the first starship to Alpha Centauri. And it would be affordable to the masses like commercial air travel is—or was before President Disasterville and his party started taking a wrecking ball to the American economy and the foundations of western civilization.

That is if we can survive that and stop the anti-everythings from regulating the private space industry to death or succeed in getting the Senate to ratify another UN treaty that bans private enterprise from space.

Not long after Shatner’s return from his historic groundbreaking flight; these narrow minded, anti-everything environmentalist know nothings like Joan Collins and the rest of a celebrity chorus rose up to lambaste and demonize Mr Shatner for being an evil rich bastard spending money in space instead of donating it to solve problems on Earth. And even worse- creating a dangerous distraction from their crusade to save the planet by encouraging people to want to leave it: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/joan-collins-william-shatner-space-b1942820.html

That is such a tired old argument that sickens me at times. Brings back bad memories of how my childhood dream of living and working in space when I grew up was sabotaged and put on indefinite hold by leftist counter-culture movement in the 1970s. Their slogan: “Let’s solve our problems on Earth first”. That sure worked out well. Little miss Greta was not the first person to have their dreams stolen.

As for Joan Collins and her cohorts who call Shatner a fool-

They are the fools. Typical myopic throw the baby away with the bath water thinking environmentalist know nothings (and they call Trump supporters “stupid”). Mr Shatner talks about baby steps for moving polluting industries off the planet and Ms Collins just blows off the prospect of asteroid mining and sourcing electrical power from orbiting solar platforms in favor of a not so green Green New Deal that entails covering huge tracts of land with inefficient solar collectors and bird killing cruise arts and ripping up rain forests in Africa with child laborers slogging in toxic mud to build lots of toxic batteries that will end up in landfills after they get thrown away. And keeping us mired down in a world ruled by the politics of scarcity; shortages and sacrifice and never ending malaise of the Limits to Growth people like Joan Collins and other pop culture elites who share her views. And most policy makers in Washington for that matter who totally lack both common sense and a positive vision for the future.

This attitude is not unlike that of some people I know who just have this knee-jerk reaction against the idea of sending people or things into space. Even privately funded activity because they presume to know what is best for society and ought to have a say in how other people run their businesses or spend their money. Oh the arrogance of it all! I even knew someone who resented the idea of Habitat for Humanity building houses to donate to the poor. On the grounds the recipients didn’t work for it and didn’t deserve it—totally oblivious to the idea that it’s private charity provided voluntarily as opposed to government housing funded by robbing taxpayers. There is the same disconnect in the outcry attacking William Shatner’s expensive junket on a private spaceship vs professional astronauts riding on government ships to a government funded space station. Even after private enterprise dramatically drove down launch costs in the last few years which NASA failed to do it over the course of several decades.

So in the words of little Miss Greta: “how dare they”!

“How dare they”! It’s Jeff Bezos’s ship and William Shatner’s money and people ought to be free to use their property or invest or spend personal wealth as they please—regardless whether it the know nothings who object know better. The same know nothings who failed to solve all those Earth problems in the past 40 years since they demagogued the Apollo Program into extinction while the nation poured trillions of tax dollars and wealth stolen from future generations into many wars and down many a rathole. And the best they are capable of coming up with today is their wretched Green New Deal that will fail to deliver the sustainable economy they promise while putting many of us in the poorhouse—or the grave.