... 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.
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.