New Milestones In Stupidity

There are days when I hate the Capitalist Triumphalism of Wired Magazine. Case in point:

When the United States beat the Soviet Union in the first race to the moon, it confirmed the view, to many, that capitalism rules and communism sucks. But the state that President Reagan called The Evil Empire learned its lesson and embraced capitalism wholeheartedly, in space at least, while NASA ossified into a monstrous, inefficient bureaucracy that would have done Khrushchev proud.

First things first - the state the Reagan called the Evil Empire was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and that state no longer exists. The state that "embraced" capitalism wholeheartedly is the Russian Federation, and those two countries are not the same thing. God, is basic historical literacy too much to ask for?

Secondly, if anyone drew the conclusion from the Apollo program that "capitalism rules and communism sucks" then they're idiots. NASA was in the 1960s as much a command economy as anything that Brezhnev could draw up. The Americans made incredible technical progress, but it wasn't free-market dynamism behind it. Rather, it was government spending to the tune of $100 billion dollars, which you've got to admit will solve a lot of problems.