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> political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape.

These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization.

Name every place in the solar system where NASA missions currently are located. Outside the solar system? Where they have gone historically? Their achievements are staggering; history-making events are routine; they are by far the greatest explorers in the history of humanity. Certainly they aren't perfect and every organization can improve, but they do pretty well.

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> These things happen in private sector organizations too

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.

> Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization.

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.

SpaceX sits atop decades of resources in what constitutes sound aerospace engineering practices, and is being helped by the fact that their scope is far, far more limited than NASA's.

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 think limited scope is exactly the point made by skriticos2.

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.

"massive" being the critical word, not "private" or "federal" or "government"

Google has had plenty of scope creep but it hasn't been mission-fatal

Yes it has. Their search result pages are crap lately, overcomplicated with ads everywhere; it's the same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002. Google is in decline; a slow decline perhaps, but it's happening.

"..same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002." Are you serious?

Yes I am. Red Queen Rule applies - I'm sure Google's tech has got better, but so has that of the SEO folk.

And Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which demonstrate that the private sector can organize on this scale quite well, thank you.

Google doesn't have products that are expected to operate perfectly 15 years from now in outer space. Google's products can survive significant defects, have bug fix turnaround times measured in minutes, and worst case, can take some downtime without too much harm.

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.

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.

You say the latest, but 2013 wasn't that long ago.

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

> And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.

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.

Because it's the exact same rehearsed process that's performed for years at a time on hardware and software that is considerably safer than off-the-shelf computer hardware.

How do you reckon? iirc, close to half a million people worked on Apollo; that's much bigger than Google. I don't think there are any private sector organizations significantly bigger than that figure?

"half a million people worked at Apollo" -- that number included contractors as well, a word which has slightly different meaning within government. It'd be as if we included key divisions of Intel and Cisco inside of Google's numbers.

I would argue that Google does a lot of things poorly, which turn out to not be a big deal in the sector they are in but would certainly be a problem in aerospace. This isn't a knock on Google, the requirements are just different.

Their scope is to colonize Mars. NASA's scope is to land a man on Mars.

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

SpaceX's scope is irrelevant until they can be viable without substantial assistance from Mars, from the point of view of the private-is-better supporters.

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.

Well argued. I would just add...

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.

I guess we could conclude from this set of arguments that a mission spearheaded by public space organizations and supported by the scalable infrastructure private space corporations provide is going to be the mainstay of any future missions; mars or otherwise.

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

A company can make a loss indefinitely, as long as they don't run out of money. While Elon Musk carries such a high personal net worth, and the dream of hitting Mars stays front and foremost, that means they can make a loss for a very long time...

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

Elon Musk and his friends' personal fortunes are a drop in the bucket compared to an established federal agency's funding. NASA's requested funding for 2014 is $17 billion.

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.

> It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play

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 :)

"a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously"

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.

SpaceX's mission to colonize Mars isn't about making money, it's about colonizing Mars.

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

I'm not sure what your point is exactly.

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.

If they were ready to make a serious attempt, I'm sure they could pull the funding together with sponsorships alone.

Amazon's failures do not result in the obliteration of their most valuable infrastucture. A small hickup isn't likely to completely ruin their company, it will only set them back a small amount.

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

I'm not comparing what Amazon & SpaceX are making, but the very-long-horizon vision both companies are committing to. Amazon reinvests today's income to work towards what they want to be in the 2030s and beyond.

Amazon could start turning a huge profit tomorrow if it wanted. The only reason it doesn't is because of titanic capital expenditures funded by operating profits.

How exactly is a mission to Mars comparable to this?

Amazon reinvests all operating income from today to build the Amazon of the future.

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.

SpaceX basically has just one customer which it is entirely reliant upon. The government.

Amazon has millions.

> SpaceX basically has just one customer which it is entirely reliant upon.

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.

> As far as I can tell NASA accounts for less than half of SpaceX's business.

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.

Good point, I hadn't realized the USAF contract was awarded to them yet. That puts government funding at significantly more than half of SpaceX's existing contracts. I still wouldn't say they basically have only one customer, but it's closer than I thought.

With the "technological moat" SpaceX is building, does it matter how few customers they have today if no one can compete with them?

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.

SpaceX's scope is first and foremost to continue as a profit maximizing entity. NASA exists to improve collective scientific knowledge and research. Say what you will about Elon Musk, but SpaceX is, and therefore, acts like a business.

Without a firm mandate, a deadline and a budget it's kind of hard to pull off a Mars landing, or any sort of endeavor past Low-Earth Orbit.

SpaceX is not well run because of magic private sector pixie dust. It is well run because of Elon Musk.

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).

Sure, but Musk would have MUCH less impact if he were inside an organization like NASA. All of his talents and advantages would be dampened to the point that they would make very little difference in the organization.

And why do you presume that?

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

No, because he wouldn't really be running NASA the way he runs SpaceX. Government organizations are subject to a host of political influences that that don't affect the private sector. I used to work for the Library of Congress where the Librarian of Congress at the time was a political appointee who spent less time managing the collections and more time updating the carpets.

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.

>Government organizations are subject to a host of political influences

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.

my impression of Elon is that he would get crushed in any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy such as a large federal government agencies.

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

Comcast is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: CMCSA & CMCSK), which makes it liable to a host of external pressures, legal and otherwise, that SpaceX as a currently privately-owned company is not.

None of which have anything to do with why they suck.

SpaceX is better at putting a pound of stuff in LEO than Nasa per dollar by a massive margin. But that's all they do right now.

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.

> But that's all they do right now.

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.

It's more than just NASA funding, a large number of the top guys at SpaceX are or were ex-NASA engineers (or NASA contractors). It's no coincidence that SpaceX hq is where it is (in El Segundo literally next door to Northrop, Raytheon, Lockheed, and so on); it makes the hiring that much easier. SpaceX is what you get when you cut through all the bureaucratic bs which plagues the NASA organization and let the NASA engineers do what they know how to do. Brilliant stroke on Musk's part, gotta hand it to him.

SpaceX is nothing compared to NASA in scope (and history) and would be even less without NASA's (and general government) past work and experience.

> but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin.

...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)

Amount done per dollar = total done / total spent

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.

In some way the assumption that the private sector can do it better is supported by NASA itself, it's why they have contracted missions to the ISS out to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, who have managed to successfully fill those contracts for $500 million (less money than NASA was spending on a single space shuttle launch). I have tremendous respect for the work NASA has done, but there are deep flaws at the agency, and they realize it as much as everyone else does.

NASA says their average space shuttle launch cost was $450 million.

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

edit: forgot the "million"

I should have been more clear. $500 million was the cost for the entire commercial contracts program, as someone else pointed out below that is ~$150 million per launch. Whether NASA spent $450 or $500 million on a shuttle launch is somewhat irrelevant, either way it is far more than the cost of private missions performing the same service.

The Shuttle was originally an Air Force partnership where NASA was supposed to also launch the USAF's payloads, including spy satellites and the like. The 20-ton payload created major compromises as far as reusability and then the USAF wasn't interested once the thing was built.

1 shuttle launch: $450M (reality) 7 people 53,600lb to LEO

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.

It is not fair to compare the heavy lift capabilities of the Dragon to those of the space shuttle. The fact that the Space Shuttle does both heavy lift and crew transport means that whenever you want one, you also have to pay for the other. Of course you would not use the Dragon to launch the Hubble.

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).

the flaw starts that there 535 people who can tell NASA what do to, mostly indirectly but some are able to do it directly. None work at NASA.

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?

Where did you get the idea that a SpaceX launch costs $500 million? The entire Commercial Cargo development contract with SpaceX was $400 million. The subsequent commerical resupply service contract is for 12 missions for $1.6 billion. If you spread the development cost over all those flights, it comes out to be ~$150 million per launch. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Commercial_cargo_contrac...)

I think you misread the previous comment. It was referring to $500 million for a contract that included many launches. I agree that it could have been more clearly stated.

> the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

One could make the argument that the organizations that manage their processes with the least amount of in-fighting will be the ones that survive.

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

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.

>"These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported."

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.

> That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality.

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-...

A further alternate view. We could stop the warmongering entirely, and the NASA funding... Using all those combined trillions of dollars on making the world a better place.

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.

We could solve all that stuff easily right now without cutting NASA's budget.

> That's a trillion dollars that has been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality.

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).

"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."

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 Dept of Education's annual budget is about $70 billion and has been in that range for several years. I did a thumbnail estimate based on that. In fact the accumulated cost might be considerably higher.

The decline in literacy and math scores is well documented.

That is all very well, but 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?

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.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/history/edhistory.p...

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.

You have to factor in the cost of the programs it replaced, given it was largely created by transferring education programs from other government departments.

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

I thought I was aware of the early history of CT and MRI and am unaware of the space programme connection. Any chance you could point me at anything - my googling isn't getting me anywhere.

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinfaq.htm#spinfaq9

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.

> 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.

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.

If the only thing NASA had done were the two voyagers - for a trillion dollars it would still have been on the cheap.

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.

NASA costs about as much as the Carried Interest tax loophole for hedge fund managers.

It's also a lot smaller than the 4.5 trillion sunk in quantitative easing.

Quantitative easing doesn't actually cost money. The fed buys securities with it and probably breaks even or makes a profit.

And proponents of both justify them as ways of making capital available to worth while endeavors. In my mind that rings true for one slightly more than the other.

Considering the population of Earth has more than doubled from around 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion in 2014 i hardly think we can blame NASA for spending a trillion dollars.

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.

These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

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.

> It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition.

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.

The main difference is that private enterprises may fail if they do not deliver their product or the service to customers at a cost acceptable to the latter; government projects and departments do not have this check. This is not a guarantee that the private sector will do a good or even mediocre job, as they can make mistakes, malinvestments, get bailed out, or have rich and stupid customers. The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance, so government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent.

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

"government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent."

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.

> The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance

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.

The mechanism is the voice in the case of government, and the exit in the case of private corporations; opinions definitely differ on the effectiveness of either.

Where governments provide critical services, their funding should not be tied to success. That would only ensure more failure, and that's the last thing you want to do to a critical service.

> The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance, so government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent.

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.

I think you make the strongest case for government investment (which is) in expensive, capital-intensive, high-risk projects; this is probably the most defensible area of government spending. There are two strong counter-arguments I have heard against yours. The first is that the reason private organizations do not invest in these projects is that the government's tax structure makes such ventures unprofitable, and the government crowds-out private investment in these projects. The second argument is that the government is the only investor in these projects because they are investing large sums of money when it is unwise to do so, because the project is not yet worth doing, or it is too risky, and a private organization would have invested less initially, and followed-on as the project became more affordable.

The public sector is, by definition, more efficient than the private sector.

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.

I am sorry, but I think you live in a different world than I do. Where I live, many government offices get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget. This is not the behavior of an organization trying to "reduce cost or improve quality".

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.

I have seen the exact same bahavior ("get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget") occurring in large multinational corporate companies, where individual departments are very, very away from the top decisionmakers and spend a majority of their effort on budgets and infighting, and not on company results.

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.

the difference is, if a private company generates waste, its shareholders pay and competitors benefit. If government generates waste, everybody pays and nobody benefits

> Where I live, many government offices get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year

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.

Throwing money around at the end of the year is a product of a dumb budgeting process, not a govt. vs. private issue. I've worked at businesses where some units were funded the using the same process who did the same thing - coming in under budget, and squandering cash on things to avoid losing funding the next year.

Private organizations have this wonderful ability to fail if someone else can do the same job better and cheaper. This does not prevent subsets of a private organization form being wasteful, but if the organization as a whole is significantly more wasteful than their competition, they will lose.

TARP? GM? AIG? It seems like private organizations under a certain size threshold have the ability to fail if someone else can do the same job better and cheaper. Beyond a certain size, they are indistinguishable from government.

You have a valid point (although your examples not failing was the results of public action, not the private market). I think there is a trade off between economies of scale and "too big to fail". There is some size that is still too small to hide colossal mistakes, but big enough to streamline its processes.

Yes, private orgs. can fail if someone can convince them to move to another party for their goods/services. Ideally - it happens occasionally, though not often.

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.

government offices get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget. This is not the behavior of an organization trying to "reduce cost or improve quality".

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.

Ok, you seem knowledgeable in this. Can you name the departments and where you are?

What is the last large public corporation you can recall driven to bankruptcy primarily by private sector competition under-pricing or out-competing them? Let's say "large" is roughly as productive as, say, Luxembourg.

Well, large corporations that are failing usually (but not always) get purchased, and subsumed by more successful corporations, or bailed out before they go bankrupt. Some examples of this would be RCA, Lockheed, Delta Airlines, Chrysler (twice), Enron, General Motors.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

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...

This makes no sense. Say we shut down The LAPD or the VA. What would it be replaced with? The idea of a private sector police force is a little scary, and what private business would perform the function of Veteran's Affairs?

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.

I agree with all but your first sentence. Perhaps I am projecting my own beliefs on nickff, but nowhere did they say that government should not provide police or similar services. They correctly stated that the private sector has the substantial advantage of being able to fail if they do a bad job. The obvious conclusion is that Government should not do things unless there is a compelling reason not to leave it to the private sector. As you point out there is a reason for the government to provide police (and other services) that outweighs the private sector's fundamental advantage.

The issue is that if the public is unhappy with the police force there is no way for them to vote in a re-organization.

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 issue is that if the public is unhappy with the police force there is no way for them to vote in a re-organization. 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. ... 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.

> is, by definition, more efficient

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

How so? The very fact that someone makes a profit means that the end consumer is paying more than cost price.

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.

Efficiency is not part of the definition of public sector or private sector, so clearly your statement is false. It's inconsistent with the rest of your comment because you wrote "It's not a guarantee that a particular public sector project or department", which could not be case if it were true by definition. Your argument that public sectors, depending on circumstance, tend to be more efficient is quite different from your assertion that they are more efficient by definition.

What I mean is that all else being equal, public is more efficient than private. The same team doing the same task with the same information, constraints, and money will be able to provide better value to the consumer in the public eector than the private.

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.

But governments do slash budgets or cut programs altogether. And agencies typically continue on because their existence is mandated by law and (unlike the private sector) they can't choose to just ditch those customers that cost a lot to deal with. There are big variations in administrative competence to be sure, but the logical conclusion of your argument is that if you hate the President (or rather, the administration of the federal government by a given President) then the logical thing to do is get rid of the government.

I don't understand how " the logical conclusion of your argument is that if you hate the President... then the logical thing to do is get rid of the government." The voice vs exit paradigm has been employed in some arguments for anarchism, and many arguments for limiting the scope of government, but those arguments have nothing to do with the executive, and I didn't make any such argument.

I know you didn't, but where is the line between saying individual agencies are inefficient and should be shut down and the administration as a whole? There's certainly a contingent (not necessarily including you) that wants to scale the federal government back to the bare minimum sketched out in the Constitution and devolve everything except national defense and certain enumerated powers back to the States.

There is no line to draw, but there is a counter-argument. The (most effective) counter-argument is that the government agencies are capable of achieving objectives that the private organizations can or will not.

> The main difference is that private enterprises may fail if they do not deliver their product or the service to customers at a cost acceptable to the latter; government projects and departments do not have this check.

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.

If you read the link, you will see that it makes a point similar to what you are saying (but more nuanced, and well thought-out than an HN comment). No one is arguing that perfection is achievable (or even a goal), the question is what form of feedback is most effective in providing desirable outcomes.

> If you read the link ...

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.

You just described the problem with public schools.

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

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

... which would lead to the civilization being destroyed (EDIT: subsumed) by a more effective one, if the private sector wasn't actually effective. Therefore the private sector must be effective.

Over what timeframe? All the evidence is that failed states can stick around for quite a while before collapsing or being subjugated. As the US has been (re)discovering the hard way, there's a massive cost in taking over a failed state even where the intention is to rebuild it and leave - and countries like Afghanistan and Iran were obviously dysfunctional for decades. Even the Soviet Union persisted for a long time despite its fundamental economic contradictions. Even if we hypothesize some similarly fundamental dificiency in the private sector of the US of the sort that Marxists are fond of toying with, in an economy of this size it might take most of a century to play itself out. Look at Japan, whose economy has been stagnant for 20 years and whose territorial security basically derives from the US nuclear umbrella.

My claim isn't that the civilization will be wiped out. It's that it will no longer be in control of its own destiny.

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.

The Internet. The Apollo Project. D-Day. The Manhattan Project. Federal Highways. The National Park System.

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.

Would you please read my comment before replying?

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.

People get so hung up on one of them being fundamentally better than the other when in fact their fundamental differences and the tension that creates which is actually a decent compromise between a free market and a totalitarian state. "Free markets" are fully capable of leading to mass amounts of suffering. This "strife" we experience between different systems in friction is actually healthy I think.

I'd say that since the 90's there's been a general pulling back from the Washington consensus. So I take issue with your assertion about every first world country following the US. I say this as a citizen of a first world country where people are pretty concerned to ensure we do NOT follow the US in terms of political corruption and economic division.

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.

I didn't mean to assert the private sector was better at everything. Sorry for the confusion. I only meant to say that it's better at most things.

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.

I'm not arguing that the private sector is no good, but that you're making a rather circular argument in its favor. What about examples of private sector failure like the financial crisis? Equally, what about the fact that government services are typically mandated to serve everyone who comes, whereas private enterprise is free to set its own prices?

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.

The UK was a model of privatisation of public enterprise.

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...

Indeed. The only UK rail franchise still in public hands is also the only one that makes money for the state rather than requiring a public subsidy.

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

Presumably, while in public hands though profitable, it has not been paying dividends.

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.

> Presumably, while in public hands though profitable, it has not been paying dividends.

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

I was being cynical. While profits are going to the government it is hard to line your own pockets through buying shares, or get appointed to the board after leaving office.

History is littered with civilizations that had an extended period of corruption and decay before their final collapse. Rome is one example - its "death" arguably occurred over most of a century.

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

So, when private sector organizations contract to other private sector organizations for certain tasks/projects that is somehow qualitatively different then when government does it?

You've only been on HN for 450 days (I've been here 2500+), I don't think you can claim HN has gone significantly downhill since you joined.

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.

I've been on the site since day two of its public launch. About 2800 days.

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.

Totally agree with your EDIT2. It is unfortunately why I am only using throwaway accounts now.

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

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.

I know I'm philosophizing, but let me challenge the views you express with the following: people opposed to government and taxes always assume that taxes are "taken" or "extracted" from private property. Historically, though, the opposite is true: private property was extracted from common property and given to private individuals. Shared property predates private property by more than a few millennia. In fact, private property had to be invented when the agricultural revolution came about. That an individual (as opposed to a tribe) could own something was a big revolution in human thinking, and an artificial cultural construct. This doesn't change much in how people think about distribution of wealth, but it seems like people, especially in the US, seem to believe that private property is the natural state of things and government infringes on that, even though the opposite is true. Society decided to let individuals own some things -- not the other way around.

I'm not under any illusion that "private property" is some kind of perfect solution (even libertarians schism into geolibertarians, libertarian socialists, etc. around the sticky issue), but let's not fly off into pure philosophy land here. This situation is pretty direct: the federal gov't, and by extension NASA, skims off my paycheck to fund what it thinks are noble endeavors.

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?

But you can look at it the other way around: the US government is good enough to let you have your paycheck. Why do you assume the money is yours to begin with? The gov't also spends money on police and roads so that you'd be able to earn your paycheck, so it seems to me like it's doing the hard work for you.

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?

To me, it sounds like you're saying "Don't be upset at your husband for beating you, you're lucky he's letting you live at all!" After all, ownership of wives by husbands predates feminism by more than a few millennia...

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.

I was just playing devil's advocate to explore a different point of view. But if you're talking about enlightened ideas, then welfare states are also an enlightened idea predated by centuries of feudalism (which a private-property-based society with little or no government looks like).

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?

You can. It is called migration.

Same goes for roads and the fire department, amirite?

You don't think there are alternate ways to build roads or put out fires? I can tell you one thing, I definitely would like to upgrade to a better fire department so that my parents' house doesn't burn to the ground again when our shitty municipal fire department runs out of water.

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

> I definitely would like to upgrade to a better fire department

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?

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