/u/thalos3D on How can someone be a conservative and still love the space program? (Like VP Pence does.)

It is a conservative tenet that government is a necessary evil. Let's focus for a minute on the 'necessary' part.

Not everything can be done effectively by private enterprise. Printing money, foreign policy and national defense are great examples. Now, that may change at some point in the future. Maybe bitcoin changes it. We'll see. But certainly at the time the framers enumerated the 17 powers of national government this was true.

During the 1950's space research was a matter of national defense due to the cold war. That expanded into NASA, and even if you want to argue that NASA had nothing to do with national defense (which it did at the time) it was certainly true that the economics of space travel and exploration were such that no private company could have or would have pursued it. In fact, we are just starting to get to that point. In any event, NASA qualifies for the time being under the 'necessary evil' criteria. No private company could do it, no state government could do it, and it probably needed to be done.

from /u/thalos3D on How can someone be a conservative and still love the space program? (Like VP Pence does.)