Its probably a question that will baffle observers 3-400 years from now. When I was in college in the 80’s and 90’s, a lot of the disucssion was about benchmarking. The Honda Accord was essentially reverse engineered from what Detroit was selling. They benchmarked off of us and beat us. Wal*Mart was benchmarked off of Sears and Montgomery ward according to Sam Walton. They took the best ideas and built a better mousetrap.
Europe has shown us how to have both liberty and safety. Somehow, we’ve decided that we have a better idea at a frightful costs. Its sort of reminiscent of the whole Challenger explosion. I lived in Houston at the time and it hit us harder than it did in other parts of the nation. One analyst put it this way, “The Can-Do attitude was replaced with a Can’t-Fail attitude.” It ignored the nuts and bolts of what got us to the moon in the first place. You would have thought that the Apollo I debacle would have tempered the behavior of NASA just as Sandy Hook, Douglass, Columbine etc...would have tempered ours. It hasn’t.