Well well! Robin Hanson’s concept of idea futures is discussed today (though not by that name) in the New York Times: A Market Approach to Politics

Robin Hanson writes, on the Armchair Economists list:

Wouldn’t a privately organized fire department look a lot like a government one, with hoses and fire trucks and all that? Wouldn’t a private school look a lot like a public school, with desks and books and teachers and all that? Yes, of course. Governments aren’t complete idiots; they usually do things that seem at least to the untrained eye remotely similar to the way you’d want to do them to do them right. (Democracies insist on this.)

And of course you don’t want to wait until a fire breaks out to start to organize private responses to a fire. If only governments were able to anticipate problems and build institutions in advance to respond to them, then yes of course government institutions would be much superior in many cases.

But surely private organizations can anticipate problems, and surely the fact that government responses are remotely similar to best responses doesn’t settle the question of whether they are in fact better than private remedies.

Surprising scene yesterday on highway 101 near Petaluma. A man was doing minor repair to the right lane, with no flagman (nor even an inanimate substitute). Worse, he could not be seen from two hundred yards `upstream’, because of a rise in the road.

It never ends. You’ve heard of Ronald Dixon, whom a New York prosecutor wants to put in jail for defending his baby with an unregistered pistol (shortly after moving to NY from Florida). According to Mike Straw,

. . . Dixon had conscientiously filed the necessary paperwork to [register his Ruger], paying a firm specializing in expediting applications for legal defensive firearm permits in New York City. The company respectfully took his money, happily cashed the check – and then went out of business.

What, by the way, does New York public opinion say?

Later: The upshot.

Last year I cited a Salon story about a man sentenced to death on testimony that was later recanted. Searching for an update, I find this from Public Interest Litigation Clinic:

On April 29, 2003, the Missouri Supreme Court issued an opinion granting Joe a writ of habeas corpus finding that he had established by “clear and convincing evidence” that he is innocent of the murder of Gary Barber. Unless the Cole County prosecutor seeks a re-trial, Joe will soon be a free man.

In a free country, Mr Amrine would be able to sue for the miseries willfully inflicted on him.

Meanwhile here is another not so ‘lucky’.

I’m unemployed again this week, and so have more leisure to try to make this worth reading. Lucky you!

The National Rifle Association (which Vin Suprynowicz likes to call America’s largest gun-control organization) had a member arrested for leafletting on public property outside its convention.