Trevor Butterworth’s most-recent Forbes column is an especially good read. Here’s a nice passage:
An idea or plan is useless if it can’t be executed, reviewed and adjusted. Where government differs from a business is that Congress is not all working toward the same goal, which means that getting laws passed is often more important than getting laws that work passed. Maligned federal agencies are simply instructed to build out legislation as an architectural firm might be asked to build a family’s dream house by incorporating every individual family member’s personal preferences.
By the way, this article reminds me that Thomas Sowell somewhere pointed out that it is precisely because we put a man on the moon that other desirable things that might otherwise have been achieved were, in fact, not achieved.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch – or a free space program.
