It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become.

* In a start-up you can't afford to harm the enterprise in order to further your own interest: if you act parasitically you'll kill your host almost immediately.

* In a big company, you won't make a meaningful difference, neither positively nor negatively, so you may as well serve your own interests, irrespective of their effect on the whole company.

Corollary: people who want to play corporate politics concentrate in big companies, because that's where you can do it with relative impunity.

Big private companies offset this competitive disadvantage through economy of scales and/or lobbying; public services do it through taxes and monopolies. NASA isn't inefficient because it's public, but because it's huge. Its only chance to beat SpaceX would have been through political influence, the way taxis lobby against Uber (or car dealers against Tesla, AT&T against antitrust laws...), but it's too late, SpaceX is already too visibly successful and too useful: any politician killing it would be classified as corrupt / communist / whatever you call a shameless apparatchik in the USA.

SpaceX. I agree that NASA has done more for space exploration than the private sector and that SpaceX would not be where it is today without NASA funding, but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin. I would guess that NASA will be the first to land a human on Mars, but I would also guess that they will lift off in a SpaceX rocket.

Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.

I don't doubt that a private entity is as capable of scope creep as a massive federal government institution.

But I suspect mission-fatal scope creep occurs with less frequency with private entities than with massive federal government institutions.

When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever?

I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.

And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8911864/2013...

I dunno, I've often seen flaws in the broadcast of the latest football game. I think it would be more accurate to say "the latest football game is usually broadcast worldwide with flaws that are within the tolerances viewers are willing to accept", but then, people rarely die because of broadcast glitches in football games, so the tolerances there may be fairly lenient.

In some way, SpaceX's scope is much more ambitious than NASA.

It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play, and the fact that a privately-funded endeavor of such magnitude would be extremely unlikely to survive a failure, and no one in their right mind would underwrite such a project.

It's funny that people praise private companies' willingness to be flexible beyond bureaucracy yet they forget that a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously. Heck, consider how few companies are willing to do basic research nowadays.

1 SpaceX's ambitions may be broader than NASA's but their individual engineering targets are not.

2 Private space companies wouldn't exist without the public space programs, not just from a technological standpoint but public contracts have been the largest and most dependable source of revenue for private space companies.

3 Though private companies suffer from the same bureaucratic problems as governments they are more flexible because internal fights can always be resolved one way or another by engaged and decisive management (should you find yourself lucky enough to have such management.) Hierarchies in public entities are not always allowed to settle conflicts between subordinates.

    > yet they forget that a company can only survive for so
    > long without positive returns and that limits their risk
    > tolerance tremendously

For some reason, this all brings to mind the Keynes quote: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

If you count their accumulated physical assets, manpower and "intellectual property" (assuming aerospace knowledge such as that could be valued effectively), you'd find that very few institutions outside of some multinational corporations and government agencies are that big.

I doubt Musk would be able to get such funding every year until 2030, or whatever arbitrary target is set to get a man to Mars.

That of course depends on whether you expect political/military interests to be always represented by public institutes, not just today but also a couple of decades into the future. Not saying that will necessarily change, but I've read enough cyberpunk to at least consider the real possibility :)

Don't you think Amazon's stock price says differently?

To me, a private Mars colony sounds a lot like an Amazon. An endeavor with a very big mission and a very long execution time.

But SpaceX needs to make money to make colonization of Mars happen.

Making money is about making things people want. Colonizing Mars is the thing that people want; and every step towards that goal (launch vehicles, human spacecraft, etc) bootstraps them onto the next step. Much like how Amazon works; they forfeit profit today to invest in not just tomorrow, but several decades from now.

Amazon isn't launching billion dollar servers that will explode in a big publicly visible fireball when you forget to plug a cable in.

How exactly is a mission to Mars comparable to this?

SpaceX reinvests all operating income from today's offerings (launch vehicles) to build the SpaceX of the future.

Both companies appear to be bootstrapping towards a gargantuan vision that is likely decades away.

Amazon has millions.

As far as I can tell NASA accounts for less than half of SpaceX's business. According to their website they have nearly $5 billion in contracts and I can only find reference to just over $2 billion in NASA contracts.

NASA ⊂ "The Government"

SpaceX also has Defense (USAF) contracts. At least around $900 million already awarded (and that may not be all), and they recently sued to be allowed to compete for much more under the EELV program.

Didn't a SpaceX competitor install second-hand 1960s Russian rocket engines in a launch vehicle that failed recently? Its not a fault on the engines - I'm sure they were excellent - but rather an anecdote on the gargantuan barrier to competition inventing new space technology offers SpaceX.

For every Elon Musk there are a million private sector apparatchiks who run their organizations with all the efficiency of a Soviet shoe factory (see Comcast for a particularly pernicious example).

I think if he were running NASA it would probably be run pretty well.

NASA has worse problems because members of Congress see is as a tool for funneling pork spending. Any director of NASA would have to spend time playing politics with Congress in order to keep his funding and that would undermine any coherent vision that he brought to the enterprise. If buying rocket engines from Louisiana would save NASA billions in the long run, but funding depends on buying them from Alabama, Alabama it is. High-level government bureaucrats must be career fundraisers first and visionaries/competent managers second.

As the sole owner of his own launch company, Musk as a degree of freedom that he could never get as a member of the government bureaucracy and it's that freedom that allows him to run SpaceX as well as he does. In lesser hands that freedom would be a noose, but at least in that case the cost of failure to the public would be very little.

The private sector is not magically free of political influence, and SpaceX feels it stronger than most due to its reliance upon what is effectively a government monopsony.

the people that float to the top in those organizations aren't good managers, innovators or motivators - they're political strategists and careerists

I want NASA to build payloads and the private sector to build rockets. But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

Well that and launch to GEO and design and build human spacecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_V2) and are closer to cost effective re-usable rockets than anyone ever has been.

> But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

I don't recall saying that rockets are more important than payloads, but neither one does much good without the other. I'm not even sure where you are drawing the line between payload and rocket. Is the rocket that takes people to Mars a payload, or the rocket that lands on Mars, or the rocket that leaves Mars?

I am excited about SpaceX because they are dramatically reducing the cost of space exploration and industry. This makes everything NASA wants to do cheaper and more likely to actually happen.

...using NASA's money. SpaceX's money is coming from NASA. So, no, SpaceX is not doing more per dollar than NASA is.

And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars. Let's first see if they can even get people into LEO first (using decades of research and knowledge that NASA paid for, of course)

It is fair to count everything SpaceX has done with NASA money as stuff NASA has gotten done, NASA still has an astronomically larger denominator.

> And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars.

fwiw NASA does not either and SpaceX is much closer. The Falcon Heavy is expected to launch next year and will be capable of putting 14 tons in a trans-Martian orbit to Mars.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+one+space+shut...

edit: forgot the "million"

1 SpaceX dragon launch (ignoring for a second that it doesn't exist yet): $160M (target) 7 people 7,300LB to LEO

So even if the Dragon V2 comes in at its targetted price and capacities (and all historical evidence says it very much will not do that), it'll take 7 launches of it to match the payload of a single Shuttle launch. Doing some quick math here... 7 * $160M is... a hell of a lot more than $450M

So pound for pound the shuttle is half the cost of the Dragon V2's estimated price.

And in terms of actually mission profiles take something like STS-31, the Hubble launch. Payload mass there was 26,187lbs. Assuming that weight could somehow be split perfectly into 7,300 chunks and assembled in space that's still 4 launches on the Dragon V2, or $640M.

A fair comparison would be 1 Dragon launch and 1 Falcon Heavy launch which leave quite a bit of room for cost overruns before they surpass the cost of a shuttle launch while delivering twice the payload and the same number of people.

Lastly the total cost of the Space Shuttle program divided by number of launches gives us a cost of $1.5 billion per launch (2008 dollars), according to Wikipedia. While NASA lists the launch cost as $450 million, that does not include the majority of the cost of the program. NASA paid a comparatively small sum ($270 million) for SpaceX to develop the Dragon (Even if there was a second contract that I am unaware of, the cost still cannot approach that of the Space Shuttle).

This is of course the problem with the DOD as well, when the people tasked to do a job have to take into account the whims of politicians just how do we honestly expect it to be a job done well.

Of course this does happen in private industry as well, there is much ado about not rocking the boat, going with the flow etc, usually masked as some faddish project management system; only a moron wouldn't do proper project management, right?

Well, the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives.

(1) There are unfair practices in the private sector like monopolies and fraud... which are at least nominally against the rules in liberal democracies. If we allow that the government fails to enforce its rules, I'm not sure why we're confident about its ability to execute in other areas.

I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership.

If a government leader fails to often, they change their direction (as many politicians do!) or lose their job.

I'm not talking about leadership, I'm talking about organization. As in bureaucracies. It's extremely hard for any leader to streamline an organization. It's possible though difficult in a private organization. I'm not familiar with a national government that has, say, dropped its headcount by 50%.

If a private organization can't successfully make that sort of change, it gets disrupted eventually. But governments don't get disrupted like that without something drastic happening.

The difference is that NASA will likely keep getting their money regardless of whether they can come up with a viable plan. In the private sector, investors are usually not interested in financing an enterprise if it can't produce a viable plan.

I don't think there's much difference between NASA and SpaceX in terms of professionalism of the teams. The big difference is the incentive of the two companies: SpaceX either has to turn a profit, or their owners have to be willing to provide capital without seeing a return. NASA has no such restrictions, and can keep operating without turning a profit.

It's a lot like nature, really. Zoo animals don't have to hunt for food, and can lie around all day and be fed. Wild animals have to hunt for food, or they die. So if a wild animal were to meet a zoo animal, and a battle ensues, who wins? The animal that is used to lying around all day, or the animal that has to fight to survive? The two animals are not different in quality (both may be lions, for example), but they operate with very different incentives.

It's not necessarily pretty, but it works. Wild animals grow strong because if they don't, they die. Private companies grow strong because if they don't, they go bankrupt.

Sure, here's one study that supports that assumption: http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf

Took a bit of searching, seeing as I don't have access to any Journals. However, I did find more references, and no doubt you'll find quite a bit of other studies in the citations of this one.

>"Their achievements are staggering;"

So has their budget. I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D, but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.

Alternate view: we could be a little less warmongery for a decade or so and easily fund the entirety of NASA's history 4-6 times over.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...

On a side note, I completely agree with you. To us there are completely varying degrees on what we consider useful spending. And on the war-funding we are in agreement; that money should be used first before NASA's funding.

There, fixed that for you!

The old canard that space exploration has been a total waste of money just keeps popping up. Yet, our economy and the world itself have been dramatically transformed by the innovations and improvements coming out of the space program: solar energy, CAT scanners and MRI for medical applications, ceramic shielding, computer miniaturization, software methods, weather prediction, new kinds of materials, better propulsion systems for planes, food preservation, insulation, on and on.

There are many more. And then there are all the people who were inspired by the space program to go into science and technology fields.

I'd say $1 trillion, if accurate (the entire Apollo program cost about $200 billion in 2005 dollars) would be a bargain.

Compare this with, say, the Dept. of Education created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. It's cost about $1.5 trillion over 35 years, and for what? Literacy and math skills have declined almost every year since then.

Let's shrink federal spending in the entitlement and defense sectors, and put more money into space exploration and basic science, and I'll bet you we'll all end up living richer and better lives (and longer lives, too).

Could you provide references for the cost (including any programs it replaced) and the downward progression in literacy and maths in the USA since 1979?

It strikes me that more people are regularly communicating in writing than ever before and mathematics is sort of cool for the first time in several decades.

The decline in literacy and math scores is well documented.

edit - Just looked at budgets. You are picking the peak. Which makes me somewhat doubtful of the rest of your analysis. In 2009 it was $32 billion. In 2010 it was $56 billion. It peaked at $71 billion in 2011 and has been almost flat since then.

edit2 - heh, actually the peak was in 2009. Do not trust wikipedia. http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chtt=Department+of+Educati... http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-fed...

Still, the general point holds, it has not been remotely steady at $70 billion.

Appropriations since 1980 add up to about $1.334 trillion. This is not inflation adjusted, however, so the equivalent amount in 2014 dollars would be much higher.

I wish they had given NASA that money instead and maybe we'd have a colony on the moon by now.

Also, you have given no references whatsoever for your claimed steady decline in literacy and maths since 1979.

Nasa and Nasa-related contractors did not invent MRI and CAT scanners, but they contributed significantly to the technology as well as related aspects like digital image processing (developed at JPL for processing Moon images).

I mean, probably MRI and CT scanners would have been developed anyway. But space research definitely helped move things along.

Interesting, thank you, and much less than I would have guessed. Given their achievements, I think that's economical.

> That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D ...

The economists call that "opportunity cost" and I agree. I'm always a little uncomfortable with funding NASA missions to Mars, etc., though I think the benefits are worthwhile. Also, NASA has produced much science, including climate change research, which I think is clearly a good investment (based on my limited knowledge of the marginal value of NASA's research).

> ... but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.

Not really; it's not a matter of asking. Federal funds are limited and agencies fight wars, publicly and privately, over access to them. As in private enterprise, sometimes funding is decided on merit and sometimes politically.

Ironically, much of private enterprise is funded the same way -- from the federal budget.

The trove of scientific data they have gathered over the years is insane. And for the 60 years it exists, a trillion dollars is not much.

> One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D

Or borrow the money, or use wall street magic, or whatever. Also one of the recurrent critics of the current system is that corporations are slaves to the quarterly reports.

The problem with NASA in recent years is not that they spend a lot of money, but that they don't dream big enough.

On the scale of world hunger over a 50 year period, one trillion is a blip. On the other hand spending a trillion on space research over 50 years seems well worth it if within the next 50 we can colonize other planets, moons or terrariums and ensure that the Human race has a backup should something catastrophic happen.

It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition. Sometimes it even does a better job at killing, which is why private contractors exist for warfare, such as Blackwater/Academi.

If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks. But it does, all the time, because contracting is far more effective, and results matter.

It seems like your view of NASA is rather rose-tinted. Along with the impressive, courageous explorers, there are political opportunists and all of the other drama you'd expect of any large organization.

It will be interesting to find out whether the private sector or the public sector reaches Mars first.

EDIT: Regarding the political nature of NASA: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

That was a different time. In fact, it was an entirely different generation of people. But the important question is, in what ways has NASA changed since then?

EDIT 2: So, this is a troll comment, then? I'm becoming a little disenchanted with HN, actually. It's grown large enough that the voting system seems to be becoming less and less relevant. There's a certain effect that you see on Reddit where, if someone disagrees with your point, then they will downvote your comment and every subsequent comment you made, regardless of content. I've noticed the same thing happening here on HN, and it's a very recent phenomenon. I've also observed it happening to others, not just myself. I've restrained myself from talking about it, but I think I'll go ahead and speak up at this point.

I'm not sure what to do about this, actually. HN has always been a kind of second home to me, but now it's too large to have meaningful conversations. In order to even get into a position to have a conversation, you have to either be one of the top comments in the thread, or you have to reply to one of the top comments. This is less true than it is for Reddit, but it's definitely happening. The problem is this: Those who are quickest to a thread are usually the ones who will get those top spots, rather than the most reasoned or comprehensive comment. HN has some defenses against this; for example, all comments appear at the top of the thread for a limited time period, and ostensibly the voting system is supposed to keep the good ones there. But HN is growing so massive that those algorithms may need some tweaking, because the deluge of upvotes is making it difficult to achieve those spots.

But the distressing thing, for me, is that replies are becoming less and less logical and reasoned. For example, the question wasn't whether it's a good thing for governments to be contracting with the private sector, or what the negative consequences might be. The question was, is the private sector more effective than the government, in general? Yet the reply was "[privatization advocates] are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful," which is totally unrelated to the question at hand.

Anyway. What I just did is against the rules, so I'll stop now. Sorry. I'm just becoming concerned with the timbre of the site, and feel like there is no outlet to discuss this kind of thing.

I know that's a commonly repeated idea, especially in this forum, but I don't share that assumption and don't see evidence for it. I believe they are two different tools, each better at different tasks, with some overlap.

> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.

Three thoughts: 1) Government doesn't contract out every task; the U.S. federal government has over 1 million employees and a $2 trillion budget, so it does quite a bit in-house. 2) Government does contract out many things; when they do it right, they are contracting where it's most cost-effective without undermining justice. There is much research showing that much privatization loses money but enriches the contractor. 3) Many of the contracting decisions are due to politics: Lobbying, and who has what donor or has which jobs in their district, for example.

Consider that many privatization advocates and those promoting the supremacy of the private sector are lining their pockets: They are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful.

It is really a question of how one views the voice vs exit question, and how good a check those are (relative to each other).[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

In which universe?

Government projects get stopped for incompetence or wasting money about as much as they do in the private sector.

And it turns out that the private sector is just as capable of firehosing money at bullshit as the government is, otherwise all those repackaged loans wouldn't have screwed the economy.

There is a different limit on money for governments, given they back the money, but to assume that some form of cost/benefit analysis isn't generally practiced in public enterprise is to be working from a purely faith-based model of economics.

I'm not sure even this claim is warranted, from either side. Each has mechanisms for attempting to ensure the link between funding/performance, but from my perspective it seems like those mechanisms fail as often as they work in both sectors.

This cuts both ways - that's exactly why the government can and does shove money into things like infrastructure, basic research and, well, space exploration, while the private sector doesn't. There is no direct short-term profit motive for private sector in such endeavours. I emphasize "short-term", because the private sector is structured to care mostly about that. It takes a company to grow really big to invest in stuff like basic research - but at this point the internal structure of such company is more like that of a government than a free market.

The main difference is the profit motive. When a government department does something more efficiently, it has to use that efficiency to either reduce cost or improve quality.

When a private company does something more efficiently, it can take the spare money and shove it in the pockets of its shareholders.

It's not a guarantee that a particular public sector project or department will be more efficient than an equivalent private sector one; the Peter Principle may well scupper any efficiency improvements.

In addition, corporations which are closely-held have a very strong incentive to be efficient, as the officers/owners are the residual claimants. In larger, public corporations, their checks are shareholders, and their competitors, who (if more efficient) can drive a corporation bankrupt by under-pricing, or out-competing. I cannot recall the last government department driven to bankruptcy by a competitor.

It's not a symptom of public vs private, it's a symptom of lack of oversight, agency problem, and 'too big to manage' problems.

Government offices I've visited are no comparison to lush corporate settings; in fact they tend to be old buildings with old equipment and furniture. Consider what Silicon Valley corporations provide to their employees.

I've heard this story before and I believe it's a myth. I am aware of what goes on in many government offices, local and federal, and never heard of such a thing.

Democratic societies can choose to elect better suited leaders for their governance to do the job better, and vote to improve their models of governance to be more effective and provide better services/efficiency. Ideally - it happens occasionally, though not often.

Voting with dollars works about as well as voting with ballots, though. People are driven by the exact same irrational drives and misinformation whether they're behaving as consumers or voters.

The organisation includes the bit setting the budget, so if they are willing to cut it next year if this year's isn't spent, that looks a lot like the behaviour of an organisation seeking to reduce costs.

Besides, end of financial year budget spends in divisions of large multinationals also look like that.

I even found this convenient little slideshow.[7]

Here is a challenge: find more equivalently-sized government departments shut down for their failures. Examples of such failures would be the two dozen financial market regulators (as well as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) who failed to anticipate or mitigate the housing problems of 2006-2007, the various police agencies which regularly shoot innocent civilians (such as the LAPD), the department of Veteran's Affairs which caused untold suffering, or the education departments which have greatly increased spending without any improvement in outcomes.

Apologies for not addressing the second sentence, I wrote this reply before you had added that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors

[7] http://www.thestreet.com/gallery/tsc-bankruptcy2-decade/0/ph...

The point is that there are some things which only government can and should do. Shutting down vital services isn't practical nor popular. People wouldn't stand for it. If a the leaders of a city the size of LA decided to shut down the police force and replace it with something different, they would be immediately voted out of office. The government isn't some external actor forcing its will on the people. The government serves the majority, a majority that prefers that not to have basic services shut down because they aren't performing optimally.

However in the private sector this happens all the time; either forcing one company to re-organize or a re-organization happens by a company going out of business and getting replaced with another one.

Voting for a politician (especially when you are stuck with two political parties) hardly constitutes voting for a re-organization.

Maybe there is a way to create competition in some way shape or form by having several different police forces (still government sponsored) that compete for your vote or maybe something else. But there definitely is a problem that there is almost no way to properly restructure a bloated government organization when it is underperforming, and somehow that should be addressed.

The public is unhappy with Thames Water, a private company, but no amount of private sector competition pixie dust is going to make another company start digging up London's streets to provide a re-organization.

It's not a problem with governments, it's a problem with natural monopolies and that's difficult to solve. Saying "government bad" is oversimplifying.

This is not a reasonable position, nor is it consistent with the rest of your comment.

If I pay £10 for something that costs £5. The organisation that just pockets the difference is less efficient from my perspective than the one that either reduces my next bill by £5 or gives me an extra £5 worth of service.

The point is that even if a private sector company operates with perfect efficiency, there is a built-in inefficiency from the consumer's perspective because investors need to make money on the deal.

The caveat is there because a handful of strategically placed idiots or geniues could easily make more of a difference than the fact that all the money stays within the system.

Every government executive's job (including appointees' jobs and to a degree every program), relies on a public vote every 2-6 years.

Democracy isn't nearly perfect, but as we've seen, neither are the markets.

You're right that I didn't; sorry. I have a hard time putting faith in the value or accuracy of Wikipedia, especially for sophisticated analysis.

There are other possibilities: corporate lobbying, the revolving door, regulatory capture, plain old corruption ...

If the private sector model of an economy is worse, then why has every first-world country begun to follow it? Because it's more effective.

You can argue that the private sector is a different tool for a different sort of job, but my point is that regardless of the job, small organizations almost always do it better. (Incidentally, that's the thesis of startup investing.)

The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. But space exploration isn't that sort of job.

I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. Strange day. It seems like it should be perfectly obvious that private sector control is more effective than public sector control in almost every area where people need to accomplish things. There is practically a mountain of evidence in support of this viewpoint, and it's hard to find examples that contradict it, unless it's also a highly parallelizable task like constructing a highway system. The most obvious counterexamples that come to mind are the justice system and monetary regulation. But those are two counterexamples in a sea of examples.

How on earth could a small organization do any of these things?

I can understand why you feel like you're living a Strange Day in an alternate universe, because the reality of human social organization is completely opposed to your thesis. If small groups are superior to large organizations in every case and in every way, why in the hell have people been forming large organizations for so long? Are we all just stupid, incapable of seeing the basic truth that you see? Were the Romans, Mongols, British, Mayans and all the others just a bunch of idiots? People have been forming ever larger organizations for the same reason that NASA is a large organization: because it's the best way to to do big things. That's why Google moved out of the garage and hired several thousand people. If small organizations were always better, startups wouldn't require investment at all.

It seems like your reasoning is based on the Homer Simpson quote, "Because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." But I can assure you, we aren't all stupid. Organizations get big because big wins.

The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. But space exploration isn't that sort of job.

So, here's your list:

D-Day. Federal Highways. The National Park System.

Those are highly parallelizable tasks.

The internet and the Manhattan project are better examples, but it's debatable whether those things would be invented regardless of governments. They were a matter of time.

Now, about the Apollo project: Congratulations, we spent a Metric Boatload of money, and it got us what? A flag on the moon. Whoopie. The US also got to thumb their nose at Russia for a bit. That is not space exploration. That is the ability to convert a large quantity of money into a really expensive, one-time-use space car that was designed to stick a pole in the ground.

More upsettingly, the Apollo project undermined real space exploration for decades. There were some viable ideas about how this could be achieved. You may be as interested and as surprised as I was when I first realized this was true: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html

Or you can dismiss this as readily as the rest of my comments. Either way, my new years resolution is going to be to swear off any kind of politics on any kind of online forum.

Your point about startup investing is rather off the mark. Most startups fail - which is not something you can do if you're providing the water supply or sanitation services for a country (or county). Governments might be less lean but redundancy also means resilience.

Your comment about an alternative universe resonates with me. As a non American, it's how I often feel when I read comments from people like you who assert that "It's just true by definition" that the private sector is more effective at everything.

Is that really mistaken? Since I'm getting so much pushback, I should probably think about changing my view. But I don't understand how this could be true: "The public sector is better than the private sector at most jobs." It seems like the vast majority of the time, it's the other way around.

Don't get me wrong, there are numerous flaws in the public sector that I would like to see changed, but its also saddled with constraints that are at least as burdensome as regulatory overhead the private sector deals with, if not more so.

Only it turns out that a hell of a lot of the companies that bought stuff like the utilities and railways are actually the public enterprises of other countries.

So 20 of the UK rail lines are still publicly owned and run, just by another countries public sector, while our own is banned by law from bidding.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/revealed-how...

So, with impeccable logic, the government has privatised it.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of our services eventually get renationalised through a legal challenge based on competition law opening up the bidding again, as the whole logic breaks down rather completely at the point at which you try and fix it by banning any foreign publicly owned industry from bidding, then realise that you have knocked out most of the best qualified bids.

But it has been returning money to its "shareholder", the government, which is kind of analogous.

Anyway, your argument is really weird. It implies that all existing regimes are optimally fit since they exist. But that's clearly not true.

IMO, this is a troll comment. If you are making a grand point, I don't see it.

EDIT: I'm not replying to your point because I can't understand your point. Apparently it's obvious to you, but it is far from obvious to me what you are saying.

Why did this devolve into a number comparison contest, rather than addressing my main points?

EDIT: Oh, here we go. Now I'm looked down on with so much scorn that you won't even reply to me. Really? Edit wars?

My point was this: The average comment is becoming shorter, meaner, and less logical. Additionally, the value of the voting system is becoming diluted over time, as more people participate. Mainly I'd like algorithmic protection from people who downvote all of your comments regardless of how well-reasoned your followup replies are. Limiting people to one downvote per person per thread seems reasonable.

My thesis in the main discussion is that if you hand a job to the public sector and to the private sector, the private sector will accomplish it with fewer resources and more quickly than the public sector. The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. The counterexamples are the justice system and financial regulation, yet those are only two counterexamples compared to a huge body of examples.

Regardless of which one does it better, NASA is funded through forcefully-extracted US tax dollars. They can be as stagnant and bureaucratically bloated as they want to be thanks to moral hazard. I'll gladly support space exploration, but it should be using resources that are donated voluntarily.

Unfortunately this leviathan that nobly funds NASA also spends trillions dropping bombs on brown people halfway across the planet, funding revolutions to topple governments, and violently suppressing victimless crimes (e.g. drug use, prostitution) that have a very real negative impact on my life and the lives of others I have no qualms with.

If we could decide which systems to voluntarily contribute to, which ones would be funded?

And as to voluntary choice, why do you think that voluntary choice by the individual is more important than the choice of society as a whole? After all, you have a democratically elected government, so it represents the set of deals or compromises struck by the members, and various groups of members, that form society. How is that not voluntary? Who says your own individual will is more important than that of society? It seems to me that the current system is a lot more voluntary than the one you're proposing. In the current system deals are formed to pool resources together to achieve common goals. Because pooling resources is required to achieve some goals, how would that be achieved in your system? My guess is that people who have accrued more wealth (thanks to the government's work) will use their influence to advance the goals they desire, without taking into any account the will of most other people. Is that fair?

Private property is an enlightened concept based on the fact that a person's own labor is his and not the property of the state/tribe to appropriate at will.

And the tribe didn't appropriate the individual's labor. It was naturally assumed that if you're a member of a tribe (that you rely on for survival) then your work should benefit the tribe -- not you specifically. Doesn't that make sense?

edit: since I'm getting downvoted anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/whowillbuildtheroads

Then why didn't you? Are there laws against private fire departments? Of course that's not a fair question because public fire departments suppress the demand for private fire departments, but do you think better fire departments would be available for comparative prices without public interference?