Amid all the immediate stuff about the pandemic is a sensible and logical long-term strategy from the White House. The Trump administration has declared that all those resources out there in space should be exploitable as private property. This might not sound like much, but it’s the essential precondition of anyone doing anything with any of it.
Current law about all those rocks out there in space says that they’re a common resource, open to all humanity. Which is nice, sure it is, but it’s also law that was put in place back in the late 1960s. Back then, those not addled with LSD were trying to levitate the Pentagon with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman — not a great time for sound economic policy.
One of the things we’ve learned down here on this mortal coil about minerals is that someone has to own them. Ownership, in its most basic sense, is being able to stop someone else from taking something — the point being that it takes a lot of money (really, a lot) to go and find a nice stash of something useful. Then more money again to delineate it, work out how to raise it, process it, and get it to market. However, once all of this has been done then, it is necessary to have exclusive rights to exploit that deposit. For if anyone can just come along and dig up what has been discovered at such expense, then why would anyone spend the money to work it all out in the first place?
This is the standard public goods problem. When it’s not possible to profit from creating something because we can’t exclude people from copying or partaking, then that creation doesn’t get done. This is the reason for patents, copyrights, and mining claims, to allow profit to be made by limiting access. The inverse is also the reason for government subsidy of basic research — people can’t profit from doing it, therefore not enough of it gets done, thus subsidy.
The 1960s was sufficiently addled that it thought the solution was to insist on not solving the problem, by making access open to all. Trump’s executive action is sensible in that it applies those hard-learned lessons from down here on Earth to up there in space.
Sure, there are other problems we’re going to have with space mining. Other than perhaps Helium-3 (and that’s a definite maybe), there’s nothing we can mine up there that will be worth the cost of bringing it back here. Not even platinum or palladium — despite various asteroids being full of tens of thousands of tons of the stuff. The problem is that if you brought back 10,000 tons of either, the sort of amount you’d need to pay for having done so, the metal would be worth spit here on Earth because we don’t use that much. The idea of going to space to get iron and the like when we have entire mountain ranges of it here is ludicrous.
No, space mining is going to be about gaining the resources to be able to go further out into space, from the Moon to the asteroids, to the giant planets, to the Oort Cloud, and so on. The whole point is to, you know, boldly go where Star Trek did. It will be a fine adventure and one well worth undertaking. But it’s one that can only happen if those who find mineral deposits out there can stop other people from mining them — that is, only if space allows private property.
We could even make the argument that just because the engineer god got in to make the universe put metals up there, why should any private company or individual make a profit? This argument has the merit of being, on its own and standing alone, entirely reasonable. But the answer is that if we don’t allow profit through insisting on that most basic attribute of private property (excludability), then nothing ever will happen.
That just isn’t the way to live long and prosper, nor the way to gain peace and long life.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
