I think that Megan McArdle (and Tyler Cowen) has a good explanation for one of the reasons that space policy, and NASA is such a mess. It has too much money:

In an altogether excellent piece on medical innovation, Tyler Cowen notes:

The NIH works as well as it does because the money is mostly protected from Congress. It is not a success which can easily be replicated. The more money is at stake, the more Congress wants to influence allocation. We should guard this feature of the system jealously and try to learn from it. If we can.

This is a seriously, seriously underrated factor in public policy analysis, and I include the libertarian variety. The fact that you can do something awesome with $15 million does not mean that you could do something super-awesome with $150 million. It may simply not be possible to broaden what you are doing very much before countervailing forces–such as congressional interference (Exhibit A: the goddamn Acela)–kick in.

This is a fundamental problem of bureaucracies, and one that won’t be fixed with regard to space until private activities are much larger than government ones. Or actual space accomplishments become politically important. They certainly aren’t currently, and haven’t been since the sixties.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of Megan, she’s spending some time in Hanoi, and has a lot of interesting posts about Vietnam. Check out this one, on the state of the economy and human productivity:

The sight of people carrying goods in traditional ways, selling produce off the backs of bicycles, looks terribly romantic. I walked past two tourists today who were agreeably chatting about how beautiful and sustainable it all is. But it’s hard to find anything romantic about human beings using themselves as mules.

As one commenter notes, wealth doesn’t just happen on its own (or rather, it does if not prevented by poor governance), and unfortunately, collectivist economic theories tend to destroy, rather than create it.