Canthook

Barack Obama has a great idea when it comes to campaign financial reform. The problem has been that monied interests could buy candidates, or at least obtain long-term leases. By using the internet to effectively raise contributions from an immense base, he's gone a long way to eliminate that risk. And it frees up $80 million in federal money in the bargain.

That's a pretty, well, conservative idea. Governments are good at creating and maintaining bureaucracies - and this is one less bureaucracy. What's more, it's a conservative idea in that it supports the first-amendment concept of free speech. Money is, to a certain degree, speech, and you should be allowed to speak on political matters without having the Federal Election Commission staring down your collar.

Senator McCain doesn't like the idea, and we hope it's simply because he hasn't gotten around to doing it first. You can be sure that the GOP will be prepared in 2012. But I think we'll all notice that money is less and less important in political campaigns because of the internet. The biggest use for that money was in buying television ads, but advertising on television is getting less and less productive. Instead of watching 3 channels of TV, cable viewers are selecting from 57. All right, so cable loads you up with a bunch of shopping channels nobody watches, but satellite gives you 50 million channels, and 49 million of them are interesting to someone.

Don't ask us who watches the Golf Channel. Nobody we know is willing to admit to it. Especially since Tiger is out for the rest of the year, and my wife has lost interest in golf.

The other idea is Senator McCain's proposal of a $300 million prize for someone who invents a better battery.

As we said, bureaucrats are good at bureaucracy. When Michael Milken had prostate cancer and wanted a cure, he didn't set up a bureaucracy; he tore one down.

He found some scientists that were working in the field. He asked them how they'd spend a bundle on research, if he were to give them a grant. They said, uh, let us work up a proposal. He said "No!"

I don't want a proposal, he said. I don't want to wait a couple of years after you're done to get your results published, either. I want you to outline what you're going to do with the money on the back of a cocktail napkin, then do the research, then we'll hold a seminar ASAP after you're done, and you present your results to the field there. Then the other researchers in the field can figure out what they want to do next.

It didn't take long. Nobody was interested in doing prostate cancer research when he showed up, but quickly word got around that cancer researchers studying prostate cancer actually got to do research. Amazingly, it turns out that doing research, rather than shuffling paper, is what cancer researchers become cancer researchers for.

The Milken Miracle is what they call it. The 1400 projects he funded in a few short years accomplished more than 40 years would have, at the old rate. It excited the people researching other disorders. Milken runs FasterCures now, teaching other organizations how to get results. At one time, many cursed Milken for selling junk bonds - but he's turned out to be a Mother Teresa of our times.

If you haven't figured it out yet, Milken was offering a prize to encourage research. It was a prize - the Orteig prize of $25,000 - that got Charles Lindberg to fly solo across the Atlantic. It was a prize - the Ansari X Prize - that got a non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It was intended to encourage the development of low-cost space flight - and at $10 million, it was probably a bargain.

And a prize of $300 million might just get us a better battery for cars.

It's important to note that the Orteig prize didn't buy anything. The Ansari X prize didn't buy anything, either. We're not buying a battery. We're encouraging LOTS of inventors to work on batteries. And if a Japanese company wins the $300 million prize? Wonderful - because the point is to get better batteries into the marketplace, so we can buy battery-powered cars. Maybe those cars will be built using the Japanese battery. Maybe they will be built using a competitive battery. In either case, those are cars not using imported petroleum for fuel, but being powered by nuclear power plants or coal-powered power plants.

If we spending $150 billion over 10 years in alternatives source of energy, are we going to handle licensing? Will those technologies be available only to a few American companies? Will they be available to companies throughout the world who sell to US customers? What about companies, either American or foreign, who sell to foreign customers? Will there be high royalties, low royalties, or no royalties at all?

We're pessimistic about the government doing research. We're good at bureaucracy, not invention. Some senator from Wisconsin will declare that the money is being poorly spent, and give it a golden fleece award. The bureaucrats will spend $140 billion on bureaucracy to keep the other $10 billion from being wasted - and by imposing their iron thumbs on the researchers' work, will guarantee that nothing at all gets accomplished. The floggings will continue until morale improves.

Or to put it another way, nothing much good ever came from organized research. It requires serendipity - and the freedom that only comes from an underfinanced garage operation, or from an unauthorized "skunkworks" project.

The original "skunkworks" was a Lockheed-Martin project to build the XP-80 jet fighter in 1943. They started work four months before authorization, and followed 14 rules guaranteed to make a bureaucrat pull out his hair, but they delivered the project ahead of schedule. Today, "skunkworks" is a registered trademark.

Serendipity is a big reason Google tells their researchers to waste one day a week, doing things that don't make economic sense for the company. It turns out that the wasteful one day a week not only is the most profitable day for the company, but the things they learn in that wasted day turn out to be useful the other four days of the week as well.

Obama is attempting to portray McCain as an enemy of wind power, solar power and biofuels as well. That's bad politics, for those three three sources of power make little sense.

Solar power might make sense on the moon. There are no clouds to block the sun, nor wind to interfere; just lay the panels out on the ground, and they stay put. Acreage is cheap on the moon.

Even where wind is fairly dependable, such as the trade winds offshore, it's not particularly economical. If it was, clipper ships would still be hauling freight.

And if you can raise a crop for biofuel, you can raise food. It's just plain silly to be burning crops for fuel.

Without seeing the specifics of McCain's plan, it's difficult to know whether the battery prize would be a smart expenditure.

What constitutes a "better" battery, anyway? Is it power to weight ratio, power storage per dollar of cost, number of charge cycles the battery can go through before it expires? There are a lot of tradeoffs to consider, and it's not likely that we'll find improvements in all three at once.

But focusing the efforts of garage inventors on a specific goal is a very smart move. You get a lot of bang for the buck.

Obama has campaigned thus far on the idea that he offers a change in the political process, rather than a change in specific policies. He should say, "Great ideas are exactly what we need, and this looks like a jim-dandy idea. This is exactly why we need John McCain in the Senate. The Presidency is an administrative and leadership position, and he should accept and promote great ideas, no matter where they come from."

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
Ansari X Prize - Barack Obama - battery prize - better battery - bureaucracy - campaign finance - FasterCures - golden fleece - inventors - John McCain - Mike Milken - Orteig Prize - skunkworks