> All of their glories and all of their accomplishments have taken place within the bosom of the government.

I can only agree. I haven't had the opportunity to socialize with a lot of folks who've lived their entire adult lives under the umbrella of government jobs or highly unionized jobs.

As things have it, I recently did have that chance. I had dinner with a married couple, both of whom have worked government jobs since, well, forever.

I have to say that it was a real jolting experience. It was truly like talking with people from another country, if not another planet.

My take was that the framework (union and/or government) creates such a layer of isolation from what I'll call real life that it creates a highly distorted view of reality (in my opinion) for those within it.

A recent example I heard about was that of a librarian that, after working for some 15 or 20 years earning $100K to $120K per annum (with insane benefits) will retire at a very young age with a pension paying her nearly $250K per year for the rest of her life (and retain such bennies as amazing health-care coverage). This is due to a rule in the contract of many unions that causes pension pay to be calculated on a salary that can be "spiked", as they put it, during the last couple of years by taking courses and doing things that, again, by union rules, count towards the salary calculation.

You can fully expect someone like that to have a completely skewed view of reality. Few private citizens, entrepreneurs and small business people have the opportunity to earn $250K a year with such good benefits, much less retain that for the rest of their lives while doing no work whatsoever. And, for good reason: In the real world that is almost always mathematically not sustainable. There are very few circumstances that allow a business to provide 90% pay --forever-- to retiring employees while having to hire a replacement. It's a case of simply arithmetic.

I firmly believe that this kind of thing, this kind of sub-culture, if you will, is really bad for this country (and any country that supports it). I don't know the internals of Greece, yet from outside it seems that it may very well be an extreme example of this effect. This is a case where millions of people live in a state that is so incomprehensibly shielded from reality that it, effectively, causes a devolving of potentially valuable human capital. In some cases this effect crosses generational gaps ("union towns" or "government towns"). By "devolving" I mean that the removal of the need to fight for survival devolves a human being into an automaton of sorts that will spend decades working within a system that does not compensate or require excellence. Mere participation is all that is needed and the rest of your life is covered. One has to wonder what some of these folks may have been capable of had they been challenged to be better than that. Hence my use of the term "devolve".

I didn't want to inject politics into the SpaceX discussion, but I think Aldrin, et al. have done this themselves. As highly accomplished and intelligent as they are (I don't see them as "trained monkeys" as someone said earlier) it is true that they lived their entire lives within this altered-reality that government and union frameworks can and do create. That, I've concluded, perhaps unfairly, isn't good for the human condition.