An interesting essay from Arnold Kling:

One of my strongly-held beliefs, for which I tend to attract supporting evidence and repel contrary arguments, is that markets process information more effectively than does the political process. Perhaps it as an exaggeration to refer to the market as the “world of truth,” as Tim Harford does in The Undercover Economist. However, it strikes me that it is easier for market forces to drive a bad firm out of business than it is for political forces to extinguish a policy that fails to meet the objectives that purportedly drive its enactment.

Those who believe in the wisdom of the political process might argue that the competition between political elites–between Democrats and Republicans or between Krugman and Limbaugh–promotes reasonable outcomes. However, I suspect that the net result of this competition is to lead to greater accretion of government power, giving the elites more to fight over. Politics ultimately becomes a competition to promise the undeliverable, whether it be better public education, inexpensive health care, or government suppression of drug abuse or sexual immorality.

Emphasis mine. That’s why it’s so important to get a private space industry going. A government space program will inevitably be captured by its rent seekers, and be almost invariably ineffective (and even counterproductive) in its stated goals, particularly given how unimportant those goals are to the body politic.