11A033
Bright, but Statist
by Jim Davies, 2/2/2011
The McAuliffes of New Hampshire exemplify the best of
collectivism. Steven is a lawyer who has risen close to the top
of his profession, while his late wife Christa rose to the
highest point in her life - "a history teacher, making
history" as she said herself - at the very moment it was
snuffed out in the tragedy of the Challenger explosion, a quarter
century ago last week. She had been selected from 11,000 applicants
to be the first schoolteacher in space. Steven used to be
in private practice, but switched to "government
service" and is now Chief Judge on the federal bench in NH.
Both, talented people who chose to work for stolen money.
Christa is the better known, because of the magnitude of that
tragedy, witnessed worldwide as it happened. Subsequently a planetarium in Concord was
named after her, to inspire fresh generations with an interest in
space. If the Statist religion named saints, she would by now
certainly have been canonized.
As the Daily
Camera put it, "McAuliffe and six others on board
perished as the cameras rolled, victims of stiff O-ring seals and
feeble bureaucratic decisions." The investigation blamed
NASA for launching after a cold night, contrary to the known
operational limits of the seals in the solid-rocket boosters -
presumably because as well as being a scientific venture the trip
had to win and maintain voter support for the Agency's funding.
It puzzles me that the plastic was so sensitive to low ambient
temperature, when obviously the rocket surface would fall way
below freezing a few seconds after launch as altitude was gained,
but there it was; PR triumphed over engineering and the disaster
ensued. Leading edge exploration will always be hazardous, even
after government has evaporated; tension will persist, between
meeting deadlines and minimizing risk. But when a
project's funding depends wholly on the whim of superficial
voters instead of careful owners managing their own
investments, the former is likely to predominate. It did, on
1/28/1986.
Steven's handling of the Brown
case in 2007 is notorious, and cannot be excused by the
searing experience of the bereavement he suffered two decades earlier.
Ed Brown, IMHO, is a flake. He has one thing straight, namely that no law compels
the payment of income tax; but on many other matters he has a
bizarre understanding of which way is up. McAuliffe swept aside Brown's forty motions
to dismiss, though he's quite bright enough to know that Brown's basic
contention - that no statute compelling payment of this tax has ever been found - is
exactly right. So at the very least he could have
stopped the trial on the grounds that Brown was too insane to
defend himself, but more simply and properly dismissed the case outright for want of any law he might have broken.
But he did neither, for he knew quite well that as a
government agent he was expected to help maintain its revenue
stream - the stream that pays his salary, and which paid Christa's - even though that stream had, indirectly, killed her.
So he let the trial proceed, with the ultimate result that the
Browns are locked up until they are aged 102.
The McAuliffes, in their different ways, are poster children
for government. What a tragic waste of talent.
