That's the title of this week's Fox News column, which is an expansion on this post from a couple weeks ago.

Excellent closing hook! IMHO Bastiat should be required reading in high school.Especially "The Law". For the a more digestable version of economics I like giving people Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.

The article would have been more useful if you'd made substantive recommendations for how the money spent on X-33 and ISS might have been better spent, instead of wistfully wondering "What if..." Dismissing it as "one of the the things that are not known" is really lazy/sloppy criticism, not something I usually associate with Mr. Simberg.

I have word limits in Fox columns. In many other places I've offered proposals for better ways to spend the funds. My point in that piece was Bastiat's--that it's not possible to see all of the things that don't happen because a choice is made as to how to spend money (just as we don't see all the jobs that are never created due to protectionist measures, because we only focus on saving existing jobs).

Excellent column, Rand.

"Unfortunately, when NASA has such programmatic failure (or even more spectacular ones, such as the loss of the Columbia), they are perversely rewarded by getting even bigger budgets, on the ostensible basis that they failed because they didn't have enough money (rather than the programs were mismanaged by the agency, or micromanaged by Congressmen more concerned about "jobs" than wealth or programmatic achievement)."

Humm....rewarded for failure. Could it be that astronauts dying to get NASA more money? NASA keeps behaving the same and the "accidents" keep happening for the same reason strongly supports the notion. Its a lot more than "Broken Windows and Shattered Dreams" - its dead people. NASA should be disbanded and its management should be charged with at least manslaugter rather than be given more money to burn.