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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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Via propaganda.
Specifically, in the form of "Yes, all y'all are starving and we had to shoot a few of your friends and relatives for not being enthusiastic enough, but look! We are actually achieving GREAT THINGS! Digging ditches in Siberian permafrost is part of the common effort which makes our society SUCCESSFUL and we can prove that it is successful because we just WON THE SPACE RACE!".
I think that the Soviet Union actually got a lot of propaganda mileage out of Sputnik and Gagarin in real life.
And that is, of course, ignoring the other part -- that space rockets with minor modifications function perfectly well as ICBMs...
Also, there's a more direct connection: They both involve the government deciding to allocate resources. In the case of the space race, the government allocates resources to something; in the case of the starving Ukrainians, the government takes resources away from someone. But they're flip sides of the same process, which is a top-down dictatorship using ideology to decide who gets to have the resources.
All governments are in the business of allocating resources, both directly (US government spending is about one third of GDP) and indirectly through laws and regulations.