I absolutely believe that, had the west not suffered such a severe cultural and industrial slowdown, we would have had enough time and resources on our hands to develop the technology required for interplanetary space travel and already have a craft made that could travel between planets at practical velocities.
Hardly. The only reason we went to the moon was as a big 'Fuck you!' to the Soviets. The heavy investment in new alloys, engines, and such could never have been justified in a commercial setting. It took the government funding the developments and then turning around and recouping some of the money by selling those break throughs to the corporate sector that allows companies like Virgin to play around with space tourism for the vastly wealthy as a mere novelty.
Where did I say that governments wouldn't be involved in developing spaceflight? Obviously, ours already kicked off the trend, so it would be rather academic to argue for or against the idea that huge corporations and egoistic billionaires would have got there on their own. Regardless of where the seed came from though, the space exploration idea and its accompanying R&D isn't monopolized by any one sector, and both have considered advancing it. As such, assuming the culture wasn't predisposed with the Cold War and still fascinated by the idea, either one could capitalize on it--and probably would have.
I would point out, however, that just as the development of the military space shuttle that orbited the earth not too long ago most certainly involved private contractors that pursued educations for
non-public sector purposes, so too did the original space program.
