Bethany McLean on Tesla's Gigafactory 2 boondoggle in Buffalo, NY

In public, Musk doesn’t talk much about Tesla’s factory in Buffalo—a place he once, in better times, dubbed Gigafactory 2. Gigafactory 1, of course, is Tesla’s much-hyped futuristic electric car plant outside Reno. Gigafactory 2, which is shrouded in silence and secrets, was a controversial side venture: a high-stakes move to dominate America’s growing market for solar energy. Tesla bought the factory’s main tenant, SolarCity, for almost $5 billion in 2016. The plan, in true Muskian hyperbole, was to turn the plant in Buffalo into what was billed as the largest manufacturing facility of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. SolarCity would build 10,000 solar panels per day and install them on homes and businesses across the country. In the process, it would create 5,000 jobs in an area that very much needed them. “This is one of the poorest cities in the country,” Scott says. “You get a big company here, and it’s a big deal.”

From the outside, the sheer scale of the Buffalo plant sparkles with promise. At 1.2 million square feet, it stands at the point where the Buffalo River bends through the city. The building is gleaming white, as if to signify its freshness amid a landscape of abandoned grain elevators and sprawling, desolate steel mills. The area around the factory is hardscrabble working class; until SolarCity was built, people only drove through it when the fierce wind off Lake Erie shut down the highway that residents take from the southern suburbs to downtown. Now three flags fly in front of the factory: those of the United States, New York State, and Tesla.

But three years after Tesla bought SolarCity, there are serious doubts as to whether the plant will ever fulfill its promises. The website CleanTechnica, which is mostly supportive of Musk, calls SolarCity “a disaster waiting to happen.” A potentially costly lawsuit alleges that Tesla acquired SolarCity at the expense of its own shareholders. And former employees want to know what happened to the massive subsidy Tesla received. “New York State taxpayers deserved more from a $750 million investment,” a laid-off employee named Dale Witherell wrote to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. “Tesla has done a tremendous job providing smoke and mirrors and empty promises to the area.”

~ Bethany McLean, "How Elon Musk Fooled Investors, Bilked Taxpayers, and Gambled Tesla in Order to Save SolarCity," Vanity Fair, August 25, 2019

Kirkpatrick Sale on the 6 decade NASA boondoggle

The whole six-decade-long U.S. space boondoggle, from 1958 to 2019, has cost this nation at least $601 billion.  And what can we say we have achieved for this vast sum?  Well, freeze-dried food, Tang, computer chips, memory foam, and the burials of 23 American citizens and one Israeli.  There have been no significant scientific achievements and very early on in the game to sell space missions as carrying out anti-gravity experiments NASA ran out of even interesting trivial observations.

No significant information has been learned about achieving something truly important, like how humans could permanently live on nearby planets or asteroids, except that it can’t be done.

~ Kirkpatrick Sale, "60 Years of Wasting Money in Space," LewRockwell.com, July 18, 2019

Cyd Malone on Arthurdale, Eleanor Roosevelt's failed social experiment

Arthurdale is a story with no hero. The American voting masses — that vanguard of the socialist revolution — wanted a strong man, exactly as that genius Marx had predicted. And, again exactly as Marx predicted, history produced that man.

His likeable wife Eleanor helped spread the gospel that underpinned the New Deal: that living off the toil of others is perfectly acceptable and moral. Most Americans, not even a century removed from fighting a Civil War supposedly to end such an inhuman practice, agreed.

Did Arthurdale help the families chosen to enjoy that money? Absolutely. Did the families enjoy an ocean of material abundance, even if many of them eventually learned that, in terms of "normal American life," they weren't in Kansas anymore? Absolutely.

Yet the good fortune of the residents does not negate the fact that they were living off the sweat of others' labor. Arthurdale was not "charity"; nobody was asked to contribute those millions any more than Thomas Jefferson simply asked his slaves to bring in the harvest.

Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends didn't use the money to "help the poor." Arthurdale was not in their minds charity; they used it to perform an experiment on the people they placed into Arthurdale. Eleanor called it a "program of long term rehabilitation." It had been decided that the people placed into Arthurdale needed to be more like Eleanor Roosevelt and her parlor friends.

Everything I've come across on Arthurdale maintains (in a manner of haughty approval) that it was a social experiment. The entire project was designed by a small clique of the powerful to see if they could improve their fellow man. In this case, admittedly just one of many such examples history provides, Eleanor was the potter and a group of dirt-poor Americans were the clay.

Where Our Creator had fallen short of perfection, where they had spotted a flaw in His work, Eleanor and her friends went riding into the breach, over the carcasses of all the other great plans intended to improve on our Creator's design.

Dr. Paul Conkin's Tomorrow A New World states that Arthurdale and the others sure to follow would be "demonstrations of a new way of life" (Conkin 1959, p. 115) and the New York Times praised it (of course) as "a national laboratory of which may come a new American way of life".

If Arthurdale was a laboratory, what did that make the Americans placed into it?

From the view of cold, hard, economic science, Mrs. Roosevelt, closely linked to Arthurdale for the rest of her days, defended her project by saying "the new hope and life given to the residents … were not to be measured in dollars and cents," showing she was as poor an economist as she was a homebuilder.

You must consider that which is unseen as well as what's right before your eyes — else you're only using half your brain. Mrs. Roosevelt, eyes set high on the progressive horizon, never looked down to notice those others she helped reduce to poverty, the jobs she helped destroy, the hope and life she snuffed out by the removal from their lives of the millions squandered on her "pet project" Arthurdale, all at the flick of her mighty ego.

By 1948, the Arthurdale project had come to a quiet end. All the holdings were sold off to the homesteaders, some for as low as $750 (Conkin 1959, p. 115). Once on the lips of every newspaper editor from sea to shining sea, the town has slid into obscurity; no longer do strangers come peeking in at the window or walk in to ask foolish questions.

Though Arthurdale was, from both a moral and financial point of view, a cataclysmic failure, I am happy to see the town live despite my misgivings about its vicious birth. I wish for the town to stand for years to come but not, like the friendly people who staff its museum believe, as a monument to noble charity. Her creation did not spring from any charitable impulse. I wish her to stand as a monument to the squandering of others' wealth, the residents' loss of freedom, and most important, the loss to all Americans of the principle that no man shall be forced to support another's crackbrained scheme.

In the end, Eleanor Roosevelt's dream of covering America with Arthurdales came true — from sea to shining sea, federally funded housing projects are not hard to find. For better or for worse, in them we have Arthurdale's legacy.

~ Cyd Malone, "The Peculiar History of Arthurdale," Mises.org, August 8, 2007