Once you understand that all countries want to “steal your technology”, then it becomes easier to understand that the best way to “beat them” is to out compete them.

Let’s not overlook that American capitalists are certainly capable of stealing technology from other countries, as well as our own people.

I’m sure many of us have had to sign agreements upon employment that anything we conceive while at work automatically belongs to the employer, whether they had anything to do with it or not.

“The placement of widely-available commercial space components on the Munitions List has left the US space industry crippled in the international market.”

Once you understand that all countries want to “steal your technology”, then it becomes easier to understand that the best way to “beat them” is to out compete them. Without a strong and vibrant export market, we will continue to lose marketshare on the global marketplace, which means that our “enemies” become stronger by just watching our silly attempts at restricting trade.

We need to come up with more common sense restrictions, and review them frequently. The unintended consequences of the current ITAR restrictions seem to be worse than doing almost nothing.

But when a technology is available from non-US vendors, the goal of restricting the technology is not accomplished. What does happen is that US employers are prevented from competing in the global marketplace and the US loses revenue and jobs. The placement of widely-available commercial space components on the Munitions List has left the US space industry crippled in the international market. Companies refer to US components and software as “ITAR contamination”, since if they include even a single chip, screw, or line of code from a US supplier, they are then unable to sell their satellite. Commercial space on the Munitions List is the “Buy Anywhere But American Act”.

The use of restrictive policies like ITAR has always been something that should be strongly limited in an industrial world where participation in world-wide trade networks has been the primary generator of new wealth. When we refuse to trade, which is what ITAR was *supposed* to do in *very* specific instances, we restrict those network’s ability to generate wealth for all of us. However, there is another aspect of damage from ITAR that mirrors what the USSR did to itself during WWIII.

That is the hope that we can get long-term benefits from restricting the flow of technology, so that we need not invest so much in new technology development. In fact, the benefits of keeping any large nation from getting from us a particular bit of technical capability is seldom effective for longer than a decade. Why? That is about the maximum amount of time a determined national effort to build a parallel technical capability would take another major country that has lots of first class engineers. Then why do it? The deranged hope, among those who would control our society that they need not focus so much of our resources on technical development, so it can be available for pork that buys votes.

That’s right. IMHO, the long-term gain of these restrictions is not to the Republic as a whole, but to those politicians who think they “need” to keep the international competition weakened. Thus and so, they need not bend to the demand for new technology development in the very most competent hands we can get, instead of sending pork to those hands that will pull the right voting levers. This comes about when we “buy” most of a technical developmental effort through oligopsony, or in some fields, monopsony.

Note: Monopsony means single buyer, usually a bureaucratic hierarchy, and it has just as many agency costs as the better known “Monopoly”.

Even airliners have seen both major regulatory and financial and technical interventions by government, but the Federal technical monopsony was not present, and airliners moved forwards in productivity, responding to market demands. In contrast, the Federal monopsony on almost all rocketry technology has stagnated the productivity of rocketry, in large part because the pols controlling that monopsony have little real interest in settling the solar system, the primary long-term use of human spaceflight. That is what we see in the dispute over the desirable emphasis at NASA on technical development versus the stagnant focus on the 40 years old technology the Senate emphasizes.

BTW, this applies to defense technology just as much as it does to technology with commercial potential. This is particularly true of ballistic missile warfare. ITAR has become a vague and weak substitute for better Ballistic Missile Defense that should have been in continual development since the mid-1950s, but has been slowed nearly to a halt time and time again. How is this a mirror image of the USSR?

In the USSR, the Party would often mandate the use of stolen foreign designs. At times they would even do so when their own scientists produced better work. That way the Party would not become dependent on the technical competence of a “class” that had a habit of rigorous thought, and which paid attention to truly objective results instead of politics. Where the Party could pick and choose between foreign stolen technology and domestic technology, they could tell their brightest technical people to shut up whenever they became uncomfortable, with little damage to the USSR’s own defense. In that way, they could raise the personal price to technical people of any tendency by their best technical people to demand reforms, as Sakharov did, anyway.

The mirror image in the US is that pols seek to keep technology that the monopsony has paid for from “escaping”. They seek to do so not to negate a group’s political power, but to focus it behind them at election day, by handing them a paycheck. They cannot do that where a technology “escapes”, placing the Republic in a position of possible future danger so that those less politically useful must be used for developing yet newer technology, because they are the best techies, not the most politically reliable. Neither political oligarchy wants to be dependent on techies, but very much want to have the techies dependent on them.

We are fools to believe this tendency is confined to any one Party. So, what’s the solution? Number one solution, get rid of the monopsony! That means the pols are not in the loop for technical decision-making, because NASA people cannot wage turf wars against commercial start-ups, as happened from 1979-2004. The implementation of this has begun. Number two solution, get rid of the belief that we are miles ahead of the world, and can afford to waste kid’s time with all the multicult diversions and market distortions advanced over the last 40 years to get us to feel better, and earn more money, when doing almost anything other than business, science, and engineering. This awaits the introduction of wide-scale competition into K-12 education. Number three solution, restrict ITAR to the control of specific technologies within the aerospace field, rather than today’s general obstacle course to US participation in the world-wide networks of Space Technology sales and development. We will not benefit from Spaceflight, if we do not participate in those markets.

“I thought that Space was exempt from military use. What is the UN Space Policy? ”

That can be found here:

http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/SpaceLaw/outerspt.html

http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/gares/html/gares_21_2222.html

It refers only to ‘nuclear weapons or any other kind of weapons of mass destruction,’ not ‘weapons’ in general, or ‘military use’ in general, a distinction lost on, or simply not known to many people.

Indeed, you could not have meaningful verification of other treaties, as their reference to ‘national technical means of verification’ mostly means reconnaissance satellites, and many of those have a military component of one kind or another…

“ITAR simply hobbles US manufacturers who want to sell satellites. If we cannot meet the world’s demand, it will be met elsewhere. I would suggest that space enthusiasts lobby for its repeal.”

If it only were satellites…