Ayn Rand's philosophical and literary struggle was to solve the problem of how to defend against moochers and looters. Equality 7-2521 ran from them in Anthem. Howard Roark ignored them in The Fountainhead. In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt lead a strike that involved the creation of what amounts to a frontier. Rand seems to have thought that a frontier would be an essential part of any viable solution.
source: Letter to David Humphreys dated July 25, 1785.
Governments (ours, theirs, it doesn't matter) are interested in continuity of government only. When government realizes that frontier formation does not serve this central interest, it backs off. Any progress made in space pioneering will have to come from commercial interests.
“Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.”
Kevin Williamson in The End Is Near and It’s Going To Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
The United States should act to simultaneously reduce expenditures and enhance revenues as follows: It should abolish all entitlements and subsidies. It should limit regulatory authority to the prevention of actions aimed at obtaining advantage at the expense of others. It should modify the Constitution to require the Federal government to provide for frontier formation on a basis equal to the national defense. To that end, it should transfer $200b a year from defense to frontier formation with the goal of harvesting the material and energy wealth of the solar system.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” William Shakespeare
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