The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. TECHNOLOGY
NASA plans a taxpayer-funded moon base to be developed by the year 2020.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: General Counsel Sam Kazman on the hope for privately funded ventures in space exploration:
“When Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975, they shot for the stars and succeeded. More recently, Allen shot for the stars again. The two successful launches of his SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X competition for private manned space flights. This feat may ultimately do for private space ventures what Charles Lindbergh’s crossing the Atlantic did for commercial aviation. The success of these enterprises obviously depended on such factors as genius, guts and foresight. It also depended on the less obvious absence of something as well – government regulation.”
2. BUSINESS
The Federal Communications Commission plans a series of public hearings on media ownership.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews and Research Associate Achim Schmillen on why we can stop worrying about “media consolidation”:
“What a waste of time: ‘Big media’ is no threat in our free society. Media companies are conduits for information of every sort, but as private parties they cannot ‘monopolize’ it. Without government censorship there is no fundamental scarcity of information, nor can there be; more information can always be created, and in a free society, particularly an Internet-enabled one, nobody can silence anybody else. Free speech activists are even breaking through Internet information blackouts in China and other censor-happy regimes.”
3. ENVIRONMENT
Sen. James Inhofe prepares for a committee hearing on climate change and the media.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis responds to Al Gore’s widely-covered book and film, An Inconvenient Truth:
“An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore’s book on ‘The planetary emergency of global warming and what can be done about it,’ purports to be a non-partisan, non-ideological exposition of climate science and moral common sense. In reality, An Inconvenient Truth is a colorfully illustrated lawyer’s brief for global warming alarmism and energy rationing.”