What percentage of your tax money should go to a government space agency?

Guess your sister does not grasp personal responsibility.

Or even adoption in the case where circumstances change after giving birth. Then again, some might say that death is the preferable option to the foster care system in the US.

Maybe I'm delusional but as far as I'm concerned space exploration is very important even if it's primarily a long-term thing (meaning a lot of private interests and politicians see no value in it).

I don't have any "faith" in the free market. In place of faith I have an economics degree from MIT, where I learned that there are many things the free market does well and other things that it doesn't do so well but that society wants done regardless. I also learned that talking about what society wants is a shorthand notation - society isn't monolithic, that there is a distribution of viewpoints and that some people, such as yourself, will be disgruntled with the direction their fellow citizens want to go in. The fact that many of them have a different view of things than you do doesn't make them stupid idiots.

The bigger question is why do you continue to live in fear? And let that fear dominate how you live your life based on the actions of other people?

There have always been people who want power over others, and who have an unquenchable lust to get more power. Those people gather dupes and form armies to gain power over their neighboring countries. Humankind is going to have to change more than most people can imagine before that is no longer true.

In the presence of such people, a neighbor either has a military, is killed, or is enslaved. The last 2 are technically peace, the sort of peace that pacifists either desire or are deliberately blind to.

You should look up the term banana republic sometime. Companies are pretty good at the first two and have made a good stab at the third in the past, though at that level the line between company and government basically vanishes.

You're talking to someone who agrees with the fundamental idea of the welfare state, so you're not going to convince me with the shopworn rhetoric of taking from the hard working folk to give to shiftless. I disagree with a lot of its execution, but wealth redistribution is a legitimate and fundamental activity of government, which is exploited far less than most of the right would have you believe. The few cases that do exist have to be sexed up with racism to be made more appealing (e.g. Reagan's mythical welfare queens).

As long as there are homes without families, and families without homes, wealth redistribution will be necessary. As long as there is both food enough to feed all, and still people going hungry, wealth redistribution will be necessary.

I'd rather a person who refuses to work--not someone who can't work just someone who simply refuses to--be fed and kept alive than allowed to starve and die. The reality is that there will be very, very few of those people, and a ton more that really need the help and will be thankful for it and are willing to also work hard.

The biggest problem I have with The Right in the US is that they seem willing to not help anyone for fear that someone might get something without working for it. It's a sort of "cut off your nose to spite your face" situation, except it's carried out through passive disregard and not active malice.

There's room enough for all this, and without exploiting those hardworking "decent" Americans, and some space exploration, if we cut down on the imperialism and make industry and business pay their fair share.

NASA isn't a space program; it's a jobs program for people who USED to care about space. But I don't think they do any more. NASA wastes an enormous percentage of what they get, and accomplish darned little. I'd rather that Space-X and X-Cor and Bigelow all compete and figure out better ways to do things than the 30-year-old shuttle.

The advancements from NASA didn't seem as grand.

If you spend money on any type of research, there will be some advancements that will be useful to others. That program could be NASA, the military, NSF, etc.

If you're real goal is technological progress, then we need to ask: where will research money result in the greatest advancements?

And the answer to that question might not be NASA.

Someone would build a military, and then take over as much as they could.

Peace requires everyone to agree. War is decided unilaterally.

Free market didn't clean the air above LA.

I have read the Federalist Papers, but there is a danger in using such contemporary documents to discern the founder's intent. They weren't gods or prophets or even really any wiser than people are today. They couldn't even begin to imagine the sorts of problems we currently face. Deifying them won't get us anywhere.

We need to do whatever we think is best, within the confines of the written rules. When we start limiting our actions based on what we think was going on in some guy's head hundreds of years ago, we end up in the same boat as religions -- fighting tooth and nail over the meaning of some half-forgotten sentence. Arguing over intent is a fool's errand, and will leave us hobbled and unable to adapt to new problems.

I live in a country that has a pretty tiny military (that pretty much only gets used for UN-style peacekeeping and disaster relief work) and an even smaller military budget. There's a reason why nobody tries to attack this country very often. It's because we generally get along with everyone else, don't meddle in other countries' internal affairs, don't start wars, yadda yadda yadda. Costs us next to nothing.

It seems the reason why the US needs a large military (apart from the influence of the military-industrial-infotainment complex over its government) is because of the actions of the same military all over the world.