Joe Haldeman's book Worlds is an answer to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the same way that Haldeman's The Forever War was an answer to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
In it, people learn once again that revolutions are no fun. I won't spoil it for you more than that.
How "quickly"? Musk called a cave rescuer "pedo guy" back in 2018. If anything, it's been amazing how long people would praise a verified asshole as long as he's rich and successful.
I think it's not political alignment, it's stupidity. If he behaved like a left-wing idiot he'd be just as stupid as if it he behaved like a right-wing idiot. (My son didn't want to go to college for a few reasons, 'wokeness' being one of them, he still thinks Musk is an idiot and I have to fight hard to get him to recognize that Musk really has done some good things... e.g. he reminded me that Musk bought Tesla, he didn't found it!)
This Bloomberg article recycles a meme image that I usually hate in a way I find hilarious:
A person in Elon's Musk position has a lot of responsibility. If he does something stupid he could endanger the jobs of SpaceX and Tesla employees, not to mention investor's stakes, or the adoption of electric cars (... maybe that will go on without Tesla) or the further development of reusable rockets.
If he wants to make a big impact in space travel he's going to need to get contracts and get permits and he'd better be sweet with whatever party is in power to do that. (I knew a black guy who had right-wing views and hated Barack Obama who owned a wonderful patent portfolio for satellite communications but wasn't going to go anywhere because of his attitude.) Trying to act like Donald Trump because it gets him a short-term rush from his Twitter followers endangers everything he's accomplished.
> wasn't going to go anywhere because of his attitude.
Which ain't right, and its far more praiseworthy to make noise about that in an attempt to fix it than it is to submit to "go along, get along." Especially when the latter is so often corrosive to society.
In this case of that individual it was not his views so much as the dehumanizing way in which he expressed them. When I said that he "hated" Barack Obama I meant it literally: it wasn't like he preferred John McCain or Mitt Romney or wanted to repeal the A.C.A. it was that he saw Barack Obama as a satanic character.
The most corrosive thing about the current political situation is that many people believe that one political party is absolutely evil (more than believe the other is good.)
Thus you really have a lot of people who think they have only one choice when election season comes around so we aren't seeing a competition to: not be corrupt, have peace and prosperity, efficient government services, etc.
Back in the 1980s I saw Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill as honorable people who fought hard for opposing views but could also come together and compromise and it just doesn't seem that way today.
> Back in the 1980s I saw Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill as honorable people who fought hard for opposing views but could also come together and compromise and it just doesn't seem that way today.
Yeah. Up until that point both parties occasionally played hardball, but compromised and made deals to get legislation passed. Afterwards, starting with Gingrich's "Contract with America" one party made "no compromise" a core value to rally the "base" and get them to the polls. Centrist Democrats kept compromising for a while to bring the GOP to the table, but eventually wised up that the goalposts kept being moved and started digging in their own heels. But it is worth noting that as a result of GOP brinksmanship today's Democratic party is largely to the right of Nixon, and Obama and Biden are to the right of Reagan.
I stopped reading at paragraph 1: "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is one of his favorite books. That checks out: the novel is about a lunar colony that bravely cuts off resources to its starving Earth dependents."
I don't think the author read/understood the book.
This review of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress somehow manages to completely omit the fact that Luna is a prison colony from which even the freeborn cannot escape due to being adapted to ⅙G.
Furthermore, the Lunar Penal Authority sets prices not just for food, but for water, fertilizer, and energy as well. The alternative to revolt is a Malthusian crisis on Luna itself, leading to food riots and cannibalism in short order (as projected by the story's AGI, Mycroft).
Furthermore, the aimed for anarcho-libertarian/minarchist utopia FAILS in its aims, and the main protagonist is left musing about emigrating for somewhere less crowded in the outer system.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty to criticise about the novel, but if you're going to pit yourself against the economic setup and the author's resolution of the crisis he set-up, you'd do well to address the actual novel, rather than a fun house version of it.
On top of everything else, it is worth considering the political economy context within which Heinlein was living and writing. Only a few years later, a Republican president instituted wage and price controls in an attempt to curb inflation, and de-pegged the US dollar from the gold standard. This, after railing for years that such measures were socialist schemes. And yet soon enough setting the exact price of milk was a matter of policy debates and political horse-trading in the Oval Office.
In 1966, the political and economic environment was far more amenable to the notion of a command-and-control economy (and in fact, we see such regimes instituted today in miniature within privately-run for-profit prisons). Heinlein's setting of a for-profit lunar Botany Bay with a captive population being squeezed to death isn't at all a huge stretch of the imagination, nor indefensible as if a mere strawman, in that context.
I suggest some better books for understanding Musk are Blood in the Streets, The Sovereign Individual
and
The New Barbarian Manifesto
Ian Angell, dubbed ""the Angell of Doom"" by The (London) Times, lays out his manifesto for the New Barbarians who will lead the economic elite into a Brave New World over the next two decades. He rejects the long-held view of information technology as our benign liberator from mundane work. Instead, he regards it as the seed for a new society, in which the winners in the knowledge economy will construct their own ""smart regions"" founded on libertarian principles and enlightened self-interest.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Barbarian-Manifesto-Survive-Infor...
In it, people learn once again that revolutions are no fun. I won't spoil it for you more than that.