Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend that may have put us irrevocably on opposite sides in the political wars.
I say wars, since everything that is discussed in the “dignified” halls of Congress is couched in terms like “fight” and “battle” and similar hyperbole, but that’s not the point here.
We were discussing the merits of government and returning the country to its roots of a constitutional republic. His contention was that there were many things that only government is able to pull off, such as education, climate repair or roads.
His claim was that government was the best at being the organizing entity behind projects such as these and others; my thoughts ran more toward the free market and people taking care of themselves.
Take roads for instance. My friend didn’t believe it was possible for anyone other than a government to pull off a project of that scope. However, I think that if enough people in a given area contribute to a project, hire their own contractors and engineers and get the job done, it would have the same result and probably cost a whole lot less.
He was incredulous, of course, because our fearless leaders are the only ones who can keep the roads rolling and the sky blue ad nauseum, hence our political falling out.
The events of last Wednesday, though, gave me just a little bit of vindication. That was when SpaceX, the private company owned by Elon Musk, returned the two astronauts trapped on the International Space Station since June of 2024.
Sure, there were contingencies, and sure, the process took longer than it should have, given that the two astronauts spent more than nine months at the station. Without the efforts of a private firm, their stay could have been longer, or permanent.
The astronauts were to stay eight days, but their spacecraft had numerous malfunctions and returned without them. NASA then tried to fix it, but couldn’t, and decided not to try, citing logistical and safety concerns as well as a lack of funding.
SpaceX’s first try was delayed until March of this year, when at long last the two were under the effect of gravity again.
There were costs involved, sure, but what’s more astounding here is the government agency failed, and that failure almost cost two lives.
It also shows that private enterprise can be just as or even more effective at things normally thought of as the sole property of the government.
Even when the government doesn’t directly involve itself, such as with roadbuilding, it creates a miasma of rules and regulations and requirements that increase costs as well as the amount of time a project takes. Ask any city or county or school representative about what it takes to get a grant to fix air conditioning or buy a school bus or pave a parking lot and see how draconian projects have become under the watchful eye of our fearless leaders.
There needs to be a reckoning here, mostly of what role the government should play in progress. While leveling the playing field is a good idea, a free market is better suited to the needs of progress and construction. Government should stick to whatever it is good at, which isn’t much, but is listed directly in the Constitution.
Tony Farkas is editor of the Trinity County News-Standard and the San Jacinto News-Times. He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
