We Could Have Settled Mars; Our Regime Chose Global Zimbabwe Instead
On What Have We Spent Money
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Led by DOGE in doing so, the Trump Administration is trying to defund wasteful government agencies and programs, and having at least some success in doing so, even to the point of pushing back against the South Africanization of America.1 It has cut funding for DEI and, amongst other things, paused USAID spending.
That, in turn, has opened up a whole new can of worms, leading to an examination of what sorts of things America is spending money on at home and abroad. The discoveries have been stomach-churning and headache-inducing. A transgender children’s comic in Peru.2 The promotion of atheism in Nepal.3 A chat room for transgender NSA, CIA, and DIA officials to plan sex meetups.4 $150 million for terror groups.5 And so on: the worst things imaginable.
But that was all peanuts compared to a related, big revelation: from 1960 to 2013 alone, the West spent a massive $5 trillion on aid to Africa.6 That’s the equivalent of about 50 Marshall Plans, which rebuilt all of Western Europe after World War II.7 And that’s just through 2013; in the years since, America has spent around $8 billion a year on aid to various African countries, particularly former British colonies like Kenya and Italian colonies like Somalia and Ethiopia.8
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None of that needed to happen. Before 1960, when the aid tally begins, Africa was still a relatively stable place, and one that was invested in from Europe while paying for those investments, rather than just being a black pit into which aid dollars went and out of which came refugees and horror stories about corruption, violence, and backwards beliefs.
Such is what imperialism wrought. While many lies have been told about the European colonization of Africa, particularly the Belgian Congo,9 the truth is that across the continent, Belgian Congo included, the Europeans brought peace from tribal feuds, excellent infrastructure, impartial justice to a degree not seen before or since in the continent, and strengthened economic situations and opportunities. Those, at least, were the benefits for the Africans.10 The colonial powers, meanwhile, got massively larger markets for their domestically produced goods,11 untold mineral riches to exploit (such as the Rand mines of South Africa or Katangese mines of the Congo), bases for their fleets, and opportunities for their restless young men to go on a potentially productive adventure.12 There were problems with the system of course, and colonies rarely paid for themselves in terms of tax revenue going back to the metropol, but they did provide military and economic opportunities to both sides of the equation.
What that meant was that the system was at least somewhat stable and productive. Europeans had an incentive to invest in the colonies, particularly in Rhodesia-style plantations or South Africa and Congo-style mineral extraction schemes, but also to care about the internal stability of the colonies, as unpleasantness could lead to unrest that upset those investments, thus necessitating reasonably good administration. So, with the Europeans in charge, Africa developed, profited the colonies and the empires, and there were incentives for just and stable rule in place that, if occasionally failing, were at least better than what existed before and has existed since.
So, why did it fall apart?
I’ve discussed this in-depth before in my numerous articles on Rhodesia and America’s involvement in destroying it,13 so I won’t repeat myself at length here. A quick summary, however, is this: when they bankrupted and butchered themselves with two World Wars, the Europeans became reliant on America and the Soviet Union, and both powers detested the old order.
Namely, they saw hierarchy and ordered liberty as evil, and needing to be replaced with some form of egalitarianism, with the Americans leaning toward mass liberal democracy and the Soviets toward authoritarian communism. But, as both had the same egalitarian goal in mind, they tended to work with each other to destroy the old colonial order, and only after it was gone did they fight, if they fought at all. This is most clearly seen in Rhodesia, but was equally true of China, Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, Burma, the Suez Crisis, and the Congo. In every case, the Americans and the Soviets aided communist rebels and regimes to destroy the old empires, and in some cases, such as Angola, they fought afterwards. Generally, as in the Congo, they tended to just support the same abominable rebels.
After that destruction of the old empires, little was done by the natives, communists, or Americans to build anything new and functional. Instead, bleary-eyed dictators of the Idi Amin, Macías Nguema, and Robert Mugabe mold took and held power with an iron fist, looting their countries in the process.
Hence, the need for foreign aid. Before Mugabe, for example, Rhodesia was a hugely successful agricultural colony known as the “Breadbasket of Africa” for the massive amount of grain its fertile fields produced. Then Mugabe enacted expropriation without compensation, took the white farmland, and the country starved, necessitating much Western aid to prevent an out-of-control famine. The same is true of the once-rich Congo, of the formerly quite successful Kenyan and Ugandan colonies, of Portugal’s lost possessions, and increasingly of South Africa.
When in the hands of the European powers, in short, the colonies received economic and infrastructure investment that generally built prosperity for the natives, the settlers, and the metropol’s investors for the long term. Now they get “aid,” which is unattached to any economic objective and generally consists of funding for radical leftist causes and money stolen by the ruling clique that ends up spent on foreign cars or sitting in Swiss bank vaults. Or, at least, that’s what they get from the West. The Chinese, with their Belt and Road Initiative, are acting out a much harsher rendition of the old imperial playbook.14
Importantly, things didn’t have to be this way. The colonies could have been left in the hands of Europeans, and thus remained relatively prosperous and stable, with America sticking to its domestic affairs, or actually fighting communism, rather than advancing the red flag in the name of egalitarianism and equity.
And what might we have bought with the saved money?
For just half the cost, we could have explored and settled Mars. Yes, really. We could have.
Remember, the cost of aid to Africa since 2012 alone has been around $80 billion dollars, likely closer to $100 billion.15
For half of that, a mere $50 billion, we could have embarked on Robert Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” program,16 even before SpaceX created the Starship rocket that is dramatically reducing the cost of getting to space.17 Zubrin’s proposal was possible as early as the 1990s,18 as described in his book The Case for Mars.
Zubrin’s Mars Direct idea consists of landing small, tested “tuna can” habitats on the Red Planet in which astronauts could live while exploring the planet, testing the soil, and otherwise doing the research necessary for long-term habitation. He envisioned rockets landing small nuclear reactors on the surface to power the bases and water reclaimers on them, growing plants in CO2-filled greenhouses, and eventually building larger bases of brick-covered tunnels. Here’s how he described the idea for later settlement in an article:19
While the base will start as an interconnected network of Mars Direct style “tuna can” habitats, by its second decade the settlers could live in brick-and concrete-built pressurized domains the size of shopping malls. Not too long afterwards, the expanding local industrial activity will make possible a vast expansion in living space by manufacturing large supplies of high-strength plastics like kevlar and spectra that will allow the creation of inflatable domes encompassing Sun-lit pressurized areas up to 100 meters in diameter.
Further, he envisioned Mars being like colonial settlements rather than modern Africa, meaning a land that uses initial state and corporate capital to build an innovative new society that harvests resources, particularly valuable minerals, so that finished products can be produced more cheaply. As he put it:
While the initial exploration and base-building activities on Mars can be supported by government largess, a true colony must eventually become economically self-supporting. The Mars colony will be able to do this by exporting both ideas and materials. Just as the labor shortage prevalent in colonial and 19th century America drove the creation of Yankee Ingenuity’s flood of inventions, so the conditions of extreme labor shortage combined with a technological culture and the unacceptability of impractical legislative constraints against innovation will drive Martian ingenuity to produce wave after wave of invention in energy production, automation and robotics, biotechnology, and other areas. These inventions, licensed on Earth, will finance Mars even as they revolutionize and advance terrestrial living standards as forcefully as 19th century American invention changed Europe and ultimately the rest of the world as well.
There would be all sorts of problems to overcome, unexpected costs to pay, and dangers to surmount. Further, the likely cost of settlement far exceeds the initial $50 billion figure for the exploration.
But it is certainly within the realm of possibility, and indeed would cost only half as much as our current $8 billion a year aid to Africa. As Zubrin described in a lengthy article on the settlement stage of Martian colonization: “[T]he projected population growth rate, 1/5th that of Colonial America, while a bit slow, is significant on a historical scale, and assuming a cost of $1 billion per launch, the $4 billion per year program cost could be sustained for some time by any major power on Earth that cared to plant the seeds of its posterity on Mars.”20
That is to say, Mars could be slowly colonized for half the cost of our lighting money on fire by giving it to Africa in each year's budget. Even if the cost doubled since he wrote the paper, and would now be $8 billion a year even with the Starship rocket, that is a cost we can obviously bear, and have borne in a far less remunerative situation (Africa aid). In exchange, we would have a frontier for restless young men to explore and attempt to settle, boundless minerals to exploit and pressures to find new uses for them, and a chance at becoming a multi-planetary species.
The only real tradeoff would be cutting funding for race communism in Africa.21
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Featured image credit: By Doctorheredoctor - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24996051
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It was somewhere in the $80 billion range through 2022: https://horninstitute.org/u-s-freezes-foreign-aid-consequences-for-the-horn-of-africa/; then there are the past two years, both in a similar per-year range, indicating it’s around $100 billion total in under a decade and a half.
This doesn’t even count Africans in America. 65% of black women work for the federal government, and of course the intense social and financial costs of black male criminality