I am not an expert on the Outer Space Treaty either, but by also by anecdotal evidence, I have always heard it to be of considerable benefit and a remarkable achievement of diplomatic foresight during the Cold War. However, I would welcome any published criticisms of the Outer Space Treaty you wish to provide.
It’s important to note that the treaty was originally ratified in 1967 (as in, ~two years before landing on the Moon, ~5 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis). If you critique a policy for its effects long after its original passage (as with reference to space mining, or as others have the effects of Section 230 of the CDA passed in 1996), your critique is really about the government(s) failing to update and revise the policy, not with the enactment of original policy. Likewise, it is important to run the counterfactual to the policy never being enacted. In this circumstance, I’m not sure how you envision a breakdown in US-USSR (and other world powers) negotiations on the demilitarization of space in 1967 would have led to better outcomes.
your critique is really about the government(s) failing to update and revise the policy, not with the enactment of original policy.
This feels like a really weird statement to me. It is highly predictably that as soon as a law is in place, that there is an incentive to use it for rent-seeking, and that abolishing a policy is reliably much harder than enacting a new policy. When putting in place legislation, the effects of your actions that I will hold you responsible for of course include the highly predictably problems that will occur when your legislation will not have been updated and revised in a long time. That’s one of the biggest limitations of legislation as a tool for solving problems!
I am not an expert on the Outer Space Treaty either, but by also by anecdotal evidence, I have always heard it to be of considerable benefit and a remarkable achievement of diplomatic foresight during the Cold War. However, I would welcome any published criticisms of the Outer Space Treaty you wish to provide.
It’s important to note that the treaty was originally ratified in 1967 (as in, ~two years before landing on the Moon, ~5 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis). If you critique a policy for its effects long after its original passage (as with reference to space mining, or as others have the effects of Section 230 of the CDA passed in 1996), your critique is really about the government(s) failing to update and revise the policy, not with the enactment of original policy. Likewise, it is important to run the counterfactual to the policy never being enacted. In this circumstance, I’m not sure how you envision a breakdown in US-USSR (and other world powers) negotiations on the demilitarization of space in 1967 would have led to better outcomes.
This feels like a really weird statement to me. It is highly predictably that as soon as a law is in place, that there is an incentive to use it for rent-seeking, and that abolishing a policy is reliably much harder than enacting a new policy. When putting in place legislation, the effects of your actions that I will hold you responsible for of course include the highly predictably problems that will occur when your legislation will not have been updated and revised in a long time. That’s one of the biggest limitations of legislation as a tool for solving problems!