I couldn’t say it better than they did, so left off the cute title:
A moon colony is a waste of money
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/30/opinion/frum-moon-colony/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
I put this here because I want my reader(s) to know that while I am intensely personally interested in space and space exploration (I plan to (perhaps more like fantasize about) building spaces stations (multiple) that house hundreds of thousands of people (each)) I think the idea of our (or any other) government doing anything beyond basic research is a total waste of time. While there is very much a chicken-and-egg issue of how to promote a commercial space business without any commercial space business, what we have now, the hugely wasteful NASA efforts or the slightly less wasteful give-money-to-a-few-specially-chosen-organizations-in-the-private-sector (sort of like my contracting gig in the intelligence community, Top Secret Stimulus!), as long as there is no financial incentive to attract entrepreneurs we won’t have anything meaningful. Sometimes the government can incent an industry, take a step back and let free enterprise do its thing (actually, I am having problems thinking of an example), but most of the time if there isn’t any money in something there won’t be any real competition, just jockeying of contracting companies to see who can get the best lip lock on the government tit.
I think the first guy who is rich enough to afford the sustained effort to pioneer space will become our first trillionaire (I hope to have that honor myself, but at this pace I will have to live to be at least 150 years old). Of course, if it takes becoming a billionaire to have that chance, the barriers to entry are such that it might take another 150 years before someone wants to make it happen (according to Wikipedia, there are only 1,210 billionaires (and how many of them have the liquid $10-20 billion to piss away in the hopes of being successful? According to Forbes, there are only 81 people with net worth of $10 billion or more (only 23 with $20 billion or more))).
So, as much as I would love to see wide spread access to space, I think having our (or any other) government on the critical path is asking for total failure (and the loss of at least another $100 billion).
Having our government on the critical path of any project (other than destroying our society) is a mistake of the first water.