>> I remember the 1960s, when American industry developed and

>> built space vehicles that took humans to the moon...

>Which was fun and great tv, but otherwise a huge waste of >time and money initiated on the whim of a liberal >presidency. Precisely the kind of misguided fiasco that >makes conservatives nervous.

Just the opposite.

The space race of the 1960s was driven by a couple of factors:

The first was JFK looking for a distraction from the Bay of Pigs fiasco

The second was concern that the Rooskies were getting all the firsts in space exploration (first satellite, first animal in space, first man in space, first woman in space...) while the USA couldn't get much off the ground. It was viewed as a national security thing.

The third was a jobs program for the aerospace industry and Texas (why else would the Manned Space Flight Center be in Houston while the launch complex is in Florida?)

Hardly "liberal".

>> But the USA could not seem to produce a good economy car...

>Because no one wanted to buy one.

Who bought all those VW Beetles and Microbuses?

> I assume you believe the government should have forced

> people to buy smaller cars. Those kind of ideas also make

> conservatives nervous. (See "Stalin, Josef" and "Zedong,

> Mao").

You assume wrong.

The American people were sold an automobile-centric mindset in the post-WW2 period. Cars were good, transit was bad. Big cars were better, a sign of success. Only poor people (failures) rode the bus or drove small cars. Remember the Beach Boys and others' car songs? "Masculinity Through Horsepower" was the theme.

The government supported the building of the interstates with tax dollars, and the destruction of transit and other alternatives through overregulation and neglect. See "Staggers Act", "National City Lines" and "Robert Moses" for examples.

>> First off, I don't think "conservatives" want to conserve.

>Huh? (See Roosevelt, Theodore)

100+ years ago. Who since then? Ike, who gave us the interstates? Reagan/Bush, who simply ignored the lessons of the 1970s? Nixon/Ford, with price controls and WIN buttons?

>I think what you're trying to say is that the solution to >the energy issue is best solved from the top down.

Not exactly. It needs to be solved at all levels. Top, bottom, middle, domestic, foreign, business, government, education, private.