The “Defense” Dept. actually endangers the United States — for example, its empire of bases brought a foreign power struggle to New York and DC a couple of years ago. (So now we have a Homeland Defense department. What were the other guys supposed to be defending?)

NASA, of course, is part of the whole dangerous military-industrial welfare program. Predictably, NASA is actually inhibiting the development of space travel by strangling competition — as a new book, Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age, argues. (Buy the book!)

Forget about Bush’s martial Martian boondoggle; what the off-world needs now is legal lunar homesteading.