How the Critics of the Apollo Program Were Proven Wrong

So there just wasn't any other way to get this stimulative effect besides the Apollo program?

Spending is spending.

If you can find work for people to do, and then pay them for honestly doing it, and that work can in some way have some sort of positive benefit it will be better than just giving people things and hoping they stop being poor.

Now that means you have to recognize education as a form of productive work, it means you have to be willing to capitalize on under utilized labour, it means you have to have valid benchmarks for achievement. Hiring 1000 random people off the street and asking them to be teachers in classrooms with 100 students each might but 100 000 kids in school but it's unlikely to give them a useful education. It means when you have an under utilized labour market you have to be willing to tax or borrow the money to get something out of that labour and so on.

Governments are largely giant insurance systems - that's good, healthcare, police, army etc. are all basically forms of insurance. But they are also able to create markets for products and drive investment and innovation, that's good too (and in fact is in many cases a part of their spending as an insurance system, think police cars and fire trucks - innovation and demand for a new product to serve a useful roll, also, they aren't reinventing the wheel when they don't have to). Governments, as giant insurance systems, are actually a good place for risk. If any random company lost 40 billion dollars tomorrow (including Apple or Exxon) it would be a disaster for that company, big enough companies can survive of course, but a lot of investors would lose a lot of money and so on. Just about all of the western governments, including greece, could lose 40 billion dollars tomorrow and it would be inconvenient but not catastrophic (well, except that greece is trapped in the Euro but lets not get into that, they could survive an added 40 billion in debt, they'd just be stuck with 8-12% interest on it). It's also very hard for a government to actually lose 40 billion dollars in a rich country, it can very inefficiently use 40 billion dollars, but 40 billion dollars trying to build a tunnel to china and failing would still have put people to work for 40 billion dollars and driven up consumer demand for all the stuff they bought, so the government would have spent 40 billion, taxed back 15 or 20 billion, and benefited some from the spillover effect. And be left with a hole in the ground that goes no where. If the apollo programme had been a complete failure (all the rockets blew up for example), or if it turned out that for whatever reason you could never actually get any equipment that would be functional on the moon (people or otherwise) then at least all the people put to work trying would have had jobs, no small subset of the population would have borne the burden of eating the lost investment.

There are more complicated layers of course, about what to do in various states of employment, when just giving stuff away is the right course of action (emergencies for example), there's spending money to prevent disasters rather than recovering from them, which then looks like you've wasted money on a problem that never materialized. And sometimes you are only putting enough money into a problem to prevent it from getting worse.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/bt1bMn6qFnk/how-the-critics-of-the-apollo-program-were-proven-wrong

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