It really doesn’t matter which is superior, I doubt in the short term political climate, you could get anyone to trust a private source of safety research. Moreover, how would you pay for it?

We don’t have a means of converting basic facts into property and therefore no means of funding the production of facts. If you discover that chemical X is perfectly safe to use under such and such conditions, how do you get people to pay you for doing that? Even if you could sell the information to one person, how would you prevent it from being broadcast all over the world within minutes?

It’s the old economic conundrum of the weather service. It cost a lot to collect the data to make a prediction but once the prediction is made there is no practical way to turn the prediction into property and force people to exchange something of value for the information. This creates an enormous free-rider problem.

The free-market isn’t magic. It requires specific mechanism to be in place and working before the market can function.

We need to start doing so.

Can I say Heinlein meets Crichton?

Science divided and separated from its regulators. I think the primary argument against it is duplication, which increases cost. This, especially, applies to Crichton’s proposal, if I recall correctly: this appears to lessen that somewhat.

a Department of Science which would perform scientific research for all regulatory agencies. Only then could we be assured that the science upon which we base our regulations would not be contaminated by institutional biases one way or the other.

Still, there are institutional motives to be slow and spread the work and increase bureaucratic reach.

There is a larger problem today: no one even bothers to debate these issues. Do bureaucracies really work with science – or is the free market simply superior? As Ayn Rand averred in “Atlas Shrugged,” “free scientific inquiry” is redundant, while “government science” is a contradiction in terms.

Nonetheless, the Terence Kealey’s “The Economic Laws of Scientific research was reviewed in Reason, Feb. 1997. The reviewer, John Staddon, closed with similar pessimism:

Unfortunately, defenders of the [statist and interventionist] status quo [in government funded science] seem reluctant to engage in debate. After describing his own repeated attempts to defend a position similar to Kealey’s, physicist Roy recently commented: “I have yet to find one similarly reasoned book or paper replying to these arguments.” It’s time to hear a detailed refutation from those who believe that American science lives or dies by the present system.

The elevation of Harry Reid’s assistant to NRC chairman bears watching though. This guy also used to be on Markey’s staff. However, so far he’s been too dorky to do any overtly political stuff.

…can be fixed by yet another giant government bureaucracy.

Actually, I had in mind just reorganizing the existing scientist into another department.

Count me skeptical.I don’t think that the corruption and subversion of science by politics, a mutual undertaking of “scientists” who want fame and money and power, but not accuracy (Ehrlich, Hanson, etc.) and politicians, for whom popularity and corruption are their life’s blood, can be fixed by yet another giant government bureaucracy.