This is exactly the problem free market capitalism attempts to solve. To put it oversimply, you have a choice: * "command&control model" the risk is born by th

This is exactly the problem free market capitalism attempts to solve. To put it oversimply, you have a choice: * "command&control model" the risk is born by the client, paying cost+15% for everything where they oversee all the work. Low trust, lots of bureaucratic overhead, but if the are competent enough, they can get the project done. * "free market" model: risk the is born by the vendor -- payment upon successful delivery -- very high profit margin if the project suceeds, but $0 pay if the project fails or is even just second best. One trick is, even in the "free market" model, you have nested command&control inside vendors, with the same problems that the original client had. You can go "free market" all the way down, but you are still stuck with all the human risks -- people can cheat, be accidentally incompetent, or lose everything just for being second best at project A when they could have been the best at project B. > Somehow we got to the moon. The moon isn't hard to reach, it's just not worth the price. If you allocate another $250B like last time, and it will get done -- either publicly command&control NASA, or by paying SpaceX. We spend collectively about $100B/yr on the Internet, and it's super complex and huge and works amazingly well (works well technically -- how people you hate choose to use it is a human social problem)