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The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national political leadership class identified itself less strongly as
by fennecfoxen 6y ago
The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national political leadership class identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today.
For reference, the nation's leadership in the 1950s included the likes of Senator McCarthy, and his famous hearings ran through about 1954. Have you heard of the "Red Scare"? No, Arecibo is the brainchild of the Cold War military-industrial complex, originally meant to help steer anti-ballistic missiles (as part of the DEFENDER program), and we should not shed too many tears that those days are over.
- ardy42 6y ago> The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national leadership identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today. Those terms don't have a consistent meaning. What was considered typical "capitalist free-market" thinking then is not typical "capitalist free-market" thinking now. For instance: Atlas Shrugged was only published in 1957 and Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom in 1963, and it took until the 1980s for those ideas to start to have wide influence in popular culture and government.