The flight
of Apollo XI was probably the most stupendous technological achievement
of the decade. (Unquestionably, it was the most stupendous bureaucratic
achievement of the decade: scheduled for 1969, it actually
took place in 1969!) Editorials in every paper in America, I suppose,
have lauded the flight as the monument to the capacities of mankind
to conquer nature and order our affairs, the assumption being
that the ability to fly a rocket implies the ability to organize
a society, in theory if not in practice. The flight has brought
to the forefront that old cliché, “Man’s scientific
wisdom has outrun his moral wisdom”; we can go to the
moon, yet somehow we have failed to solve the problem of mass
poverty in the United States. . . .

Unfortunately,
the planners can never be neutral; hence, their application of
technology to the affairs of men cannot be neutral.
Planning involves the allocation of scarce resources, and some
programs must be accepted while others are rejected. The planners
must use a scale of values – non-empirical, a priori moral
values – in the administration and formulation of their
plans. . . .

From the
Moon to the Earth

During the
week of the moon shot, I fully expected some local television
station to show George Pal’s 1950 classic, Destination
Moon. Sure enough, a Los Angeles station presented it
one evening. No doubt it was shown in other cities around the
country. I missed it this time, but I have seen it often
enough to reproduce some of its dialogue verbatim (the dialogue,
however, was considerably inferior to Pal’s special effects).
Tom Powers played a military man whose rocket programs kept producing
failures. He finally is able to convince John Archer, a captain
of private industry, to construct the rocket that will get the
job done.

The message:
only American private enterprise can get us to the moon.

That was
great stuff in 1950. Yet the reality is far, far removed in 1969.
The moon shot was, by its very nature, a task for the state. Private
firms could be contracted, but the NASA officials were behind
it, financially and administratively, from start to finish. Tom
Wicker, writing in his nationally syndicated column, put the fact
in all its clarity: “No one ever made the remotest pretense
that men could get to the moon via free enterprise, states’ rights,
rugged individualism, or matching grants.”‘ The reason: “.
. . this was government-managed enterprise, pointed toward
an agreed goal, operating on planned time and cost schedules,
with ample administrative authority derived from Federal
power and wealth.” An amen is due here. Good show, Mr. Wicker.

Mr.
Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he began
to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities
for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap.
Editorial after editorial echoed it, and I single him out only
because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the
superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible:
“So the conclusion that enlightened men might draw is that
if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied
to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be obtained.”
He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned housing construction,
say, some 26 million new units by 1980.

Flora Lewis’
column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning
capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can
be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of
cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They
seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly
distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these
achievements, too.”² Nature is boundless, apparently;
only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the
secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know
it. This is the messianism of technological planning. It is basic
to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the
success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.

Mr. Wicker
wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does
not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but
it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological
feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several
questions should be raised. First, should the state have used
some $25 billion of coerced taxes in order to send two men to
the moon’s surface? Would men acting in a voluntary fashion
have expended such a sum in this generation? In short, was
it worth the forfeiting of $25 billion worth of alternative uses
for the money? Second, given Mr. Wicker’s plans, could we
not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing,
and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction,
on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public?
Would a noninflationary tax cut not be preferable?3
It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending
(e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and recommend
a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy
to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending
by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary”
taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example,
is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient
to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James
put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion,
in and of itself, may not redeem technology, but can Miss
Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind? . . .

The
Technocrats of the 1930’s urged us to accept the economic guidance
of the engineering elite. They would eliminate “waste.”
Yet the engineers of the Soviet Union have been forced to construct
crude economic accounting techniques in order to deal with
such “capitalistic” phenomena as value and the rate
of interest. Engineering – meaning specialized, technological
competence – cannot deal with such psychological imponderables
as consumer preferences. Only the price mechanism of a free market
can do this with any degree of accuracy, which is why Ludwig von
Mises rejects socialist planning.5 If we confuse engineering
with economic calculation, we will destroy the rational allocation
of scarce resources by the market. It would involve turning over
the task of ordering literally quintillions of economic relationships
to a centralized elite with necessarily limited knowledge. The
results can be predicted: irrational decisions, petty bureaucratic
coercion, and a loss of political freedom. . . .

The astronauts
are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time
to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic.
Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are
better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in constructing
spaceship earth.