National Planetary Exploration Car Wash and Bake Sale

An anonymous reader writes "To attract media and Congressional attention to the deep NASA planetary exploration cuts proposed to take place October 1, and the need to restore the planetary budget to present or higher levels, a National Planetary Exploration Car Wash and Bake Sale is being planned for June 9th. Organizations already involved include planetary groups at many universities, research institutions, and Moon Express (Google Lunar X Prize)."

Re:I've got a better idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can say just about the same thing about all other government services. You want medical care, school systems, highway infrastructure, social security?? Then why don't you get out your own checkbook and pay for it yourself, and give me back the taxes I paid for the services you use.

Re:I've got a better idea...

[V!NCENT]

How about stopping the stupid cannabis war? Not only do you need about 33% of the current police force (I kid you not), but also there will be massive hippy protest to stop costly wars, saving even more.

Problem? I'm sure some cannabis smokers who get high before bedtime will totally bring evil to the world! (not)

Re:Public vs. private funding

[paiute]

Now imagine if the Department of Defense instead went out and spent their time trying to raise the money they need from private benefactors, rather than this silly attempt at shaming the government into giving them more stolen money. It wouldn't matter how many people don't want to fund them; if they find enough money, even if it comes from just one benefactor, they could go forward with buying guns and stuff.

Re:I've got a better idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Compassion is a ridiculously easy system to game to your advantage. Worse than that, once it gets settled, only those who game the system can get anything out of it.

Look at both history and the way begging goes in the poorer parts of the modern world. You can find professional beggars who put more effort into looking desperate than they do into finding work, even to the extent of crippling themselves, removing limbs, tearing off skin to fake skin diseases, and so on.

There are also huge biases built in. Women get more charity than men. It's easier to find charity money for starving kids than it is to prevent them from starving in the first place. Cancer victims are fashionable, tuberculosis victims are ignored.

I simply do not believe it is possible for pure charity to be fair.

I don't know much about the US welfare system, so it might well be a complete disaster, but in general the state welfare model can be made blind to all this bias, and in most of the developed world, that's exactly the point of it.

Re:I've got a better idea...

[miletus]

What's tragic is how many people here equate liberty with money. "The Road to Serfdom" is going to end up as a how-to manual.

Re:I've got a better idea...

[Curunir_wolf]

I don't know much about the US welfare system, so it might well be a complete disaster, but in general the state welfare model can be made blind to all this bias, and in most of the developed world, that's exactly the point of it.

It's also completely lacking in compassion, pushes out private charity, and is subject to allocation by politics. I can't see how that's better, especially when you consider the administrative overhead involved in collecting and distributing, which is always higher in large bureaucracies.

Re:I've got a better idea...

[Telvin_3d]

pushes out private charity

What does this mean? That once an organized effort is providing all the starving people with food, private individuals no longer throw money at a lucky few?

It sounds like complaining that the professional firemen push out citizen fire brigades. That's the whole point of it.

Re:I've got a better idea...

[JoshuaZ]

In order to effectively and reliably fund things, one needs regular sources of funding. And simply going to people and asking for a fraction of a cent is not an efficient or reliable way of getting money. Moreover, scientific research,like defense, is a public good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good [wikipedia.org] which means that everyone benefits whether they pay for it or not. Thus, people will have no incentive given the option not to pay for it since they will benefit either way. The only effective or fair way to pay for public goods is for everyone to pay.