Shifting Priorities

For some reason, I was thinking about the whole thing that happened back in the 1960's, when the Americans put a bunch of men on the moon and the Soviets did other cool stuff like that.

As a child, I grew up thinking that by the time I was an adult, we would be able to travel to the moon. I mean, at the rate things were going, back in the 1970's, this seemed plausible.

So why is it that we live in a society where my cell phone has more computing power than Apollo 11, but we can not only no longer afford to put people in space, but we can't even really pay for schools and roads anymore, mainly because people would prefer to own their own mini bar fridges.

I say this because, as far as I can tell, even super wealthy western nations back in the 1960's were still, relatively speaking, quite a lot poorer than those same societies today. Except now there's no money for anything ever.

Am I the only person who thinks that this makes no sense at all? The expression "if they could put a man on the moon" meant that the technological achievement of the moon missions was so mind-blowingly amazing that it implied that we could pretty much do anything.

Now it sounds like something some right-wing gasbag would use as an example of government wasteful spending.