The numbers are off by a factor of 1000. Every "billion" is actually a trillion. Doesn't change the point at all, though.

The U.S. federal government has a negative net worth (specifically, of -$10.6 billion). The number you quoted represents the net worth of U.S. households and nonprofits (currently at $77.2 billion). That is not money that the federal government would have an easy time getting its hands on.

As opposed to the U.S. dollar, which is backed only by currency speculators? The "full faith and credit" of the U.S. government just means that the government will always accept its own money. It doesn't give anything of value in exchange for them, so really the entire currency is predicated on other people's willingness to accept the U.S. dollar as a medium of exchange.

Nitpick: A meridian is a line of longitude. A line of latitude is called a parallel.

Government-backed home loans enable prices to skyrocket, and property taxes force existing residents out of their homes. There's nothing capitalistic about either of those things.

If NASA offered something that people wanted as much as the NFL, it would have that budget. But it doesn't, at least not at the present moment in time.

People are stupid, and they are brilliant, and they are violent, and they are peaceful. They are all of these things, at times one or the other. What they are not is universally inferior to you.

So what? You can create great things without their permission or desire. What you have no right to do is steal from them because you think you know better.

Ingenuity is a strange animal, but it rarely flows from the minds of people who find the best occupation of their time to be controlling others, and when it does, it typically comes in the form of new methods of control.

Martial strength ruled the world until the firearm came along. Such an invention would be anathema to the ordered planners of medieval battles and in fact the entire feudal system. And indeed our modern betters are keen to outlaw firearms except for themselves.

I don't have righteous indignation, what I have is a set of ideas that explains the world much better than the constant envy of socialism and its close relative technocracy.

Religion has no explanatory power over the behavior of people. Wars have been fought, peaces have been made, and commerce has variously flourished and foundered without regard to religious affiliation.

If you examine the matter closely, there is really no such thing as religion or secularism. Two people who claim to follow the same religion can disagree vehemently over something, and a militant atheist is indistinguishable in fervor and tenor from a religious fanatic.

There should be no tax exemption for "religious" organizations because there should be no tax on organizations. The government is not empowered to impede freedom of assembly, and it is certainly not empowered to elevate some organizations over others and thus dictate what is and what is not acceptable belief.

It is an idea, and ideas have no power except what people grant to them. What you're saying is that people can't be trusted to hold beliefs. You want control over their minds, and that makes you no better than a Nazi.

Who is this "they" you speak of? Clearly some people don't feel that Nazism ought to be outlawed, as they are practicing it.

What makes them bad is doing bad things, and those bad things are illegal on their own.

If and when they should ever come to power again in Germany, or anywhere else that forbids the freedom of thought and expression, rest assured that they will use this fact to portray themselves as victims.

What comfort it will be to their victims to know it was illegal to be a Nazi once.

What you're saying is that Nazism is so toxic and so powerful that it overwhelms the minds of those it is exposed to, such that they cannot control themselves. If that's what you believe, then you've already lost. No law can save you from such a force.

So much economic illiteracy in one post. Resources cannot be arbitrarily reallocated with no side effects. You are not smarter than everyone else and your choices are not inherently better. The freedom to pursue one's interests is the single most important factor in providing the level of wealth to even begin contemplating such things as moon colonies. If everyone was compelled to do what their "betters" thought they should, we would still be banging rocks together to make fire.

Generalization,

Psuedoscience,

Narcissism.

Pot, meet kettle.

We can get rid of the FBI now, right?

This is a very limited analysis of the matter, and a contestable one at that.

First, In order to "develop" alternative energy sources before it is economically sensible to do so, you must allocate some measure of resources to the task which people are not already allocating themselves. This reallocation incurs a cost upon the people from whom the resources are taken. The periodic cost may not be that high, especially since much of it is hidden by debt accrual, but the compounded cost over time can be great, especially when you factor in the debt. So even if you are able to "minimize" the apparent price of the good, you are in the process diminishing the purchasing power of the people who consume it, and thus increasing its actual price.

Second, the allocation of effort to a task does not inherently decrease its costs. Subsidies, excise taxes, and other price manipulations only distort the picture by shifting the costs to other areas. A correlative analysis of select industries does not substitute for a causal analysis of all of them. As has been demonstrated numerous times in many industries, simply throwing more money or more people at a task actually increases its costs. The so-called "economies of scale" only occur when there are high fixed costs and low per-unit costs, such that the price of the unit decreases as the greater number of units are made, and that is only feasible when there exists sufficient demand.

The price of fossil fuels is not likely to increase suddenly any more than the price of alternative energy is likely to decrease suddenly. The slow shifting of the relative prices will naturally create an incentive to develop the latter well before the complete exhaustion of the former. Furthermore, people will have created more wealth in the mean time, thus increasing their ability to afford the change. Intervening in this process actually introduces significant risk, and it is likely that the damage we create will exceed the damage that we are trying to prevent.

All of what you are talking about have high upfront costs that must be paid before the long-term benefits can be realized. Paying those costs requires great wealth, which developed countries generally have. However, for quite some time our fiscal and monetary policies have been destroying wealth--while at the same time concentrating money--which has made us less able to afford these things. The policies you are lending your voice to support are the same sort as have put us in this position to begin with, and so will only exacerbate the problem further.

You're not wrong, you're just examining things at a surface level. In economics, capital and people matter, the rest is inventions of the mind, useful mental frameworks and abstractions for analyzing complex events. The abstractions facilitate the exploitation of capital to the benefit of people, but they don't become real things just because we can talk about them. You can tax an abstraction, but in "the real world", the tax will be paid by people in the form of capital. That's not drug-induced babble, it's deconstructing the abstractions back to reality.