Saturday, February 12, 2011

Moon Treaty

I can't believe that anyone would take this seriously.  How do you enforce a treaty that regulates the behavior of only one nation who has ever put people on it?  How do you restrict any human activity that does not exist?  Is the aim to make sure that it never happens?  Evidently that is the case.  Here is one of the provisions of the treaty

Requires all resource extraction and allocation be made by an international regime.
 Good lord.  Why would you want to bring lawyers into this?  Not many countries have ratified it, so it means little.  But there is an Outer Space Treaty, if you can believe that.  I suppose space exploration by anybody in the world is everybody's business.  I guess they pretty much smashed up any idea of ever getting off this planet by doing something like this.  It doesn't expressly forbid it, but it does make it more complicated than what it has to be.  Indeed, how the hell is anyone going to know or care what the heck goes on in space?

Common heritage of all mankind?   How lovely that sounds.  But it is deeply flawed.  If nobody owns something, there nobody will care for it.  That's why you abandon the idea of the commons.  It's why communism doesn't work.  Why did our government ever agree to this nonsense?

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