Every so often an article pops up that crystallises the deranged justifications now trotted out for even the most ludricous of Dubya's policy proposals. Today's example is Holman Jenkins (subs. req'd) in the Wall Street Journal on Dubya's proposed manned mission to Mars. It's worth noting that across the page from Mr Jenkins, we have Larry Lindsey trying to convince us all that Dubya is well fit for the workload of being President, by virtue of his education at Harvard Business School. Now, we haven't been to business school ourselves, but it's surely a safe bet that there are some lectures in there on return on investment. Now witness Jenkins' justification for the Mars mission:
Up to now, though, our eggs remain in one basket, the earth, within a bigger basket, the solar system. Nature creates probabilities that, given enough time, are certainties: Someday something will bump into the earth, perhaps fatally...Nobody knows when a rock too big for humanity to survive might come along...Whether we get started this century or next might not matter against such a time frame, but every job has to have a starting point...[Dubya's] blueprint implicitly recognizes that the best reason for going anywhere is to begin creating the possibility of self-sustaining human settlements on other worlds.
That's right: in the newspaper for the business school crowd, a policy proposal from the business school President is lauded on the grounds that the nation would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Mars exploration because, some day, a giant rock might hit earth and we'd all need to move to Mars. And this is fine, because we have no real problems here on Earth anyway:
We can't be here in this world just to fill our bellies and consume health care and stretch out our days as long as possible.
This er...lunacy tells its own story about what Mr Jenkins or Dubya seem to have learned in business school. They certainly weren't listening in Stats 101 because the "logic" above is repeated in this insight:
The law of averages being what it is, even [the Mars program] will have to run the gauntlet at some point of a President Dick Gephardt who wants to raid every program in sight to feed the Medicare beast.
He could have said it in standard sports terms i.e. even if a President Gephardt is very unlikely, at some point it will surely be "due." To our vast college-age readership, go and suggest this logic to your statistics professor -- and watch his/her head explode. Or more prosaically, refer you to the standard debunking of it, such as in the gambling context. It's also the basis of a superb Simpsons episode:
Bill: Let me get this straight: you took all the money you made franchising your name and bet it against the Harlem Globetrotters?
Krusty: Oh, I thought the Generals were due!
UPDATE 6 JULY 2006: Jenkins may need to chat to his colleague Daniel Henninger, who thinks the idea of going to Mars is completely idiotic.