Today, 50 years later, thanks to less government regulation, the competitive, profit-driven private sector has produced the iPhone 4S - a phone that has more computing power than the computers that helped put the first man on the moon in the late 1960s.

Over the exact same half a century, as the private-sector economy evolved the telephone from a chunky rotary-dial device tethered to a wall and able to do just two things - make a call or receive a call - to a near-miracle of pocket-sized mobile tech capable of countless voice and data applications and even streaming video, the U.S. government was in charge of the space program and here's what it accomplished:

In 1962, the U.S. government had the ability to put a man in space. John Glenn was the first.Fifty years later, the U.S. government does not have the ability to put a man in space.

So, while we rightly celebrate John Glenn's historic flight, we should take some time to ask why the private sector was able to turn the clunky rotary dial phone into the modern smartphone, while the government's ability to put people into space declined over the same period of time. After all, both endeavors were run by Americans, employed Americans and had access to the same technological advances.

The key differences, as I see it, are vision, freedom and competition.

First, the telephone company - even thought it was highly regulated by government in the early 1960s - had a vision of a future in which the phone evolved technologically, and it sought to communicate that vision to people and to make that vision come true. Check out this rather amazing Bell Telephone ad from a 1962 edition of Boy's Life magazine, and what it predicted about the future of the telephone.

The private sector know where it was going, and as regulation eased and competition increased, the telephone rapidly evolved into the amazing devices almost every American now carries in their pockets.

By contrast, the government did not face significant competition in the space business, other than competing with the Russians to be the first to put a man on the moon. We won that race in the late 1960s, then built the Space Shuttles, but eventually the momentum of the moon race petered out to the point that if the United States wants to send an astronaut into space today, it first has to put him or her on a plane to Moscow.

Remember that the next time someone from the liberal side of the political debate suggests we should turn more of our economy over to the government to run and manage. If government had been in charge of evolving telephone technology, chances are we'd all be carrying pagers, and quarters for the pay phone.