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.

This is depressing.

So, Kathleen Willey writes a book about how she was attacked by the Clinton machine when she was forced to testify about his sexual predatory behavior. I put up a post about it, with (what I thought was) a link to an interview of her.

A commenter (anonymous, other than a first name) shows up and implies that she’s lying about her book manuscript being stolen (i.e., slandering her and besmirching her character). I challenged the commenter to go actually follow the link, and read the interview. (S)he said that (s)he had done both.

Funny thing, though. It turns out that when I initially put up the post, I pasted in the wrong link, linking to this instead, a piece by Stuart Taylor on the academic rot of political correctness.

In other words, the commenter lied–if (s)he had actually followed the link and read it, as (s)he claimed, (s)he would have complained about it not being the Willey interview, as Tom (who was apparently the first person to actually follow the link) did.

In other words, a Clinton defender shows up, slanders a Clinton accuser, and prevaricates in the process (while ironically complaining about my lack of “courteous discourse”). Just like the book says. Maybe she can add a new chapter in the next printing.

[Update at 4 PM EST]

This seems pertinent. Brent Bozell talks about the media’s whitewash of Hillary.

[Update about 5 PM EST]

Camille Paglia:

If Hillary is the Democratic nominee, I will certainly vote for her. But I continue to find it hard to believe that my party truly craves that long nightmare of d