Today I once again had an errand at a Feral office building. This time, when I asked the badge for information about the pointless rule that I wouldn’t be admitted to the building without showing evidence that some government somewhere thinks it knows who I am, I was directed to a sign on the wall containing excerpts of 41 CFR 102-74 — but the nearest thing I could find to a relevant passage was this:

When property or a portion thereof is closed to the public, restrict admission to the property, or the affected portion, to authorized persons who must register upon entry to the property and must, when requested, display Government or other identifying credentials to Federal police officers or other authorized individuals when entering, leaving or while on the property.

Solutions to this [public goods] problem in the context of basic research are discussed at some length by Terence Kealey. (The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) Knowledge of current cutting edge research – Kealey’s field is biology – is of considerable value, and it is not the sort of knowledge easily summed up on a one page memo. In practice, the knowledge is largely restricted to the people doing the research, both because they are the ones who can understand each other’s work and because they are the ones that the other researchers want to talk to. That makes such researchers valuable employees and consultants for firms and universities. While the researchers are unlikely to internalize the entire value of the information they produce, they may internalize enough so that the resulting income, along with nonpecuniary rewards of their work, make their research worth doing for them, and subsidizing for firms and universities. Kealey’s conclusion, looking at several different fields where government subsidies went from near zero to very substantial, was that there was no observable effect on the rate of progress in the field. One might interpret that as evidence that the cost of misallocation of resources through the political mechanism – diverting smart people into whatever field looked good in the popular imagination at the moment – at least balanced the benefit of the additional money.

David Friedman: Do We Need a Government? Emphasis added. (It’s easier to read in the December 2005 issue of Liberty, because David’s file uses nonstandard encoding for characters such as dash and apostrophe.)

You may have heard me advocate abolition of the US judiciary, as a way to restore some of the tension between Federal and State authorities that Publius considered so important.

Failing that, I’ve also proposed to eliminate the “jackpot” effect by allowing each President to nominate a fixed number of Supreme Court Justices per term, irrespective of vacancies. It turns out that one appointment per Congress would be about right: the present Congress is the 109th, and 110 persons so far have sat on that bench. (Followup)

This looks like a good idea:

ReadtheBill.org invites Americans of all political views: Help stop Congress from passing bills in the dead of night that nobody has read. . . . we will persuade Congress to adopt the 72 Online rule — to require posting bills online for 72 hours before floor debate in Congress.

Hee hee. The Economist says of V for Vendetta:

. . . only fans of detention centres, torture, unfettered government surveillance, screaming-mad television pundits and laws against alternative lifestyles will find anything here that could possibly offend.

Perhaps I’ll go see it today.

Rumor has it that Placer County’s jailers refused to hold Steve Kubby. If so, let’s hope they escape prosecution.

You may have noticed that I have not demonstrated solidarity with the Danish press by helping to publicize the “Mohammed” cartoons. That could be because I fear for my safety, or because I hate Western freedoms, or because the cartoons do not meet my usual standards, i.e. they’re not funny. You choose.