United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently chided billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson for “joyriding to space while millions go hungry on Earth.”
Guterres’s criticism is both unjustified and shamefully populist.
It is true that the civilian race to space costs billions of dollars. Still, the return on that investment could be even greater. In the course of a decade, entrepreneurs like Bezos, Musk, and Branson have taken a fresh look at space travel-related problems. They have then leapfrogged over ossified government agencies, which are constrained by both politics and bureaucracy. Tourism is a benefit rather than the purpose of their investments.
Guterres’s anti-space rhetoric has deep roots.
While critics have consistently attacked the U.S. space program since the days of John F. Kennedy, there is no doubt about the net positives of the race to the moon or the shuttle program. Both cost billions of dollars, but consider just the medical gains: artificial limbs, scratch-resistant lenses, LASIK eye surgery, and insulin pumps. Today’s cutting-edge water filtration systems also have their roots in the U.S. space program. Even many baby foods can trace their development to NASA. Natural disasters? People around the world are safer because of the shock absorbers NASA developed for buildings. Guterres wants to prioritize climate change, but the world’s most efficient solar cells and home insulation also grew out of the space program.
Guterres treats the secretary-generalship as a bully pulpit, but it was never meant to be.
Upon the U.N.’s creation, the secretary-general’s purpose was to be the organization’s administrator. The role was to make the organization’s bureaucracy function in an efficient way. Successive secretaries-general have failed as they prioritized their own egos and the perks of office over their core mission. This is partly why the U.N. today is so sclerotic, wasteful, and dysfunctional. Guterres need not take my word for it: He could simply ask any of his staff who are among the first to acknowledge both the organization’s problems and the disinterest of its leadership in solving them.
If Guterres truly cares about the “hungry on Earth,” he should perhaps become introspective.
Fifteen years before his selection as secretary-general, Guterres served as Portugal’s prime minister and was a lifelong member of its socialist party. He also served six years as president of the Socialist International. No ideology is more responsible for international hunger than socialism: Its emphasis on state control and centralized decision-making has directly contributed to the starvation deaths of tens of millions of people.
True, Portugal is not the Soviet Union, Communist China, or the Derg’s Ethiopia, but Guterres nevertheless embraced an ideology that advanced suffering rather than human flourishing. Capitalism may be a dirty world in progress society, on college campuses, and in Turtle Bay, but as Harvard professor Arthur Brooks has noted, it was the widespread embrace of free market reforms in Asia and Africa that lifted 2 billion people out of abject poverty. It is also capitalism that enables governments to grow their tax base so that they might donate lavishly to the U.N. in order to fund Guterres’s unnecessary travel.
Guterres got it 100% wrong. He owes Western billionaires an apology. They have achieved more in the last year than Guterres has in his life. They also develop wealth, while Guterres lives the high life on the public purse. The world will benefit from their entrepreneurship long after Guterres is forgotten.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
