There's a scene in the show "Firefly" where the character "Mal" says something that should be universally understood, but many don't seem to get.
"That's what governments are for... get in a man's way."
While the space-themed spaghetti western makes it very clear that the government is the bad guy (making it one of my favorite shows ever created), in real life, too many people see government as a benefactor and parental figure. The Democrat Party's entire platform is "give us the problem, and we'll use government to solve it," which is like telling a drug addict that the way to finally break his addiction is to inject a little bit more heroin into his system.
But even when the government thinks it's being helpful, it's truly standing in the way. Welfare is a tremendous example. The government is more than happy to hand out money to people who are struggling, but the catch is that it wants you to hook you on it and make it hard to get out of, effectively making you dependent on the state. Once that happens, it can use the money you get as a way to control your vote, and use you as a cudgel to beat Republicans over the head with.
(READ: We Have More Proof That Welfare Hurts, Not Helps)
The government gets in the way of advancing, keeping you as penned in as it can.
But government also gets in the way of human advancement when it can, and depending on who is in charge of the government at the moment, the ways it can do are so bizarre that you'd figure it would have been something Alice encountered through the looking glass.
Case in point, Nick Arama reported on Musk's explanation of how the environment-obsessed left made him do research on his SpaceX rockets hitting sharks and whales during splashdown. The funny thing is, while researching all of this, the government was wildly unhelpful and refused to give them the data they had on sharks for fear of shark hunters getting it.
Once they gathered all the data and found it was safe, the government came back with another demand that you honestly can't help but laugh at because it's so ridiculous.
🚨ELON MUSK ON RIDICULOUS REGULATIONS 😂😂
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) October 20, 2024
"SpaceX had to do a study to see if Starship would hit a shark. I'm like "It's a big ocean, there's a lot of sharks. It's not impossible, but it's very unlikely." OK fine, we'll do it, but we need the data, can you give us the Shark… pic.twitter.com/hFm9KYCMgN
Side note, the entire thing can be summed up with this moment from Musk.
Relatable @elonmusk moment. pic.twitter.com/jwtIXuWSMO
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) October 22, 2024
But I want to point out something that's not so funny here.
To be clear, I understand the need to make sure corporations don't get too out of control. Corporations will, if given the chance, run roughshod over the people, the land, and more. Their entire shtick is making money, and many of them aren't at all concerned about who they have to use or what they need to destroy in order to make it.
Apple famously uses slave labor to make their products, if that gives you any indication of what I'm talking about. If a corporation can get away with being dastardly, it will.
However, for the most part, the government stands in the way of human innovation and advancement all the time. Nikola Tesla was famously stopped from making electricity free with help from the government regulation. Orville and Wilbur Wright were resisted by none other than the U.S. government in embracing the potential of aircraft, getting no support or recognition from the government until the Wright brothers showed how aircraft could be of use to the military. George Washington Carver's ideas of crop rotation and healing the soil were often complicated by our government, who wanted to focus on cotton production.
Musk is just another name on the long list of innovators who are being held back by our own government, and in Musk's particular case, this is especially egregious because what the government is doing is effectively putting humanity's very survival in danger.
This may sound hyperbolic, but humanity's survival and advancement are dependent on getting off world and existing comfortably in space. Both the abundance of resources paired with extreme environment innovation are things that could help humanity achieve a new level of existence, and extend our chances of survival by a lot.
Even in the short-term, spinoff technologies created while solving problems out in the black could make our lives even better today. This has already happened in many ways. Many technologies developed by NASA to help with space flight are now used by civilians every day, be it memory foam, camera phones, modern water purification systems, artificial limb tech, and modern GPS systems.
The hazards of space will, ironically, help extend the life of humanity through experience and experimentation. Advancing technologies in the black will make problems we're having here on Earth seem trivial.
But more than that, becoming an interplanetary species, or even a species that have liveable space stations, will increase the chances of living on should anything happen on Earth, and the list of things that could end life on Earth are many. The ease with which a huge portion of humanity could just die off in a very short amount of time is, frankly, terrifying, be it a pandemic with an actually high kill rate, or even a solar flare from the sun knocking out our electricity and plunging us into a murderous dark age.
One of our best hopes for survival is standing back and let some crazy guy with a rocket obsession do his thing, yet the government is trying to find ways to hold him back, including bringing up the hearing capability of a few whales in the ocean.
But that's what a government is for... get in a man's way. In this case, it's getting in mankind's way.
All in all, the best government is a very, very small one.
