No one is arguing the benefits provided. But it was inefficient, and because it was government run, prone to the decisions and desires of new Administrations. thus One President says "GO TO MARS" the next says "GO TO ASTEROIDS" the next says "GO TO MOON" And Nasa can't ever long term plan, stuff get's disgned, planned and then funding is shunted to a new project and it starts all over again. Nasa is a great example of how Government isn't a great long term answer for things.
You keep missing the point, in that government isn't there to be used as an ANSWER, it's just there to ensure that the taxpayer investment benefits the end user, the taxpayer.
Blaming government for the sins of crooked leaders is dodging the issue.
Only we set the priorities and our priorities have been out of whack for a long time, and if our priorities were in order, things would be run better. We get what we deserve.
Simple analogy here, if our priorities are for more prisons, we get less schools.
It's the old guns and butter issue over and over again.
The notion of spreading hatred for the government and saying it can't do anything right, and then when you get into power, doing your level best to prove that statement true is a cheap parlor trick, and Republicans have been doing that same cheap parlor trick for almost a half century.
Had NASA NOT leveraged microprocessor technology so heavily, and stayed with transistors and vacuum tubes, we might have still made it to the Moon eventually, however it would have been much more costly and much more dangerous.
Microprocessors still would have been invented anyway but their path to that of a very cheap resource for consumer electronics would have been delayed by as much as a decade or more, the way they were delayed in the USSR and later, Russia...which only began catching up in consumer microprocessor electronics around the year 2002 or so.
It was the government "heavy lifting" that gave PRIVATE INDUSTRY the boost and the shot in the arm that it needed to get them to market that much faster, because government investment in economies of scale and manufacturing was a huge boost and a cushion against R&D overhead.
