A Stitch in Haste

A bad idea is germinating in Congress:

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill ... authorizing the Department of Energy to create a competition modeled after the X-Prize to encourage innovation in hydrogen research. The bill passed last year, but stalled in the Senate.

Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC) — the bill's lead author — outlined details of the plan last month, which include multi-million dollar prizes that would be given out every two years for technological advancements (hydrogen production, storage, distribution and utilization), prototypes, and transformation technologies.

Besides the facts that "technology" is not a public good (see, e.g., GE) and that politicians cannot "legislate discovery," the political obliviousness of the supporters of such a appropriation is astonishing.

With a Congress that riddles the budget not only with earmarks and pork, but with just plain dumb spending, suddenly we're going to entrust it, or the bureaucrats it anoints, with deciding which technologies warrant a taxpayer-subsidized prize? Who can possibly be naive enough to believe that government can be non-partisan in matters of science or education? Who seriously thinks that the same moral defectives who give us Bridges to Nowhere aren't going to give us Prizes to Nowhere?

Private persons, either as individuals or as donors to private foundations, are certainly entitled to invoke their subjective value judgments when allocating their charitable dollars. I am entitled, for example, to consider medical research more important than hydrogen research and to give my money accordingly. I am not entitled to persuade Congress to force you, through your tax dollars, to do the same.

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Don't believe that politics would corrupt the prize process?

--What state does Representative Inglis hail from?

--What field of technology does he want taxpayers to subside via prizes?

--Where does most, almost all, of the research in that field take place?

All politicians are, by definition, moral defectives.