When the sovereign neglects its duty, citizens fill the gap

NPR reports that former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have launched a new website to replace a government climate data resource that was shuttered when the Trump administration took office. The story is being told as one of admirable private initiative. I do not dispute the admirability. But let us be precise about what kind of thing has actually happened here.

In The Wealth of Nations I set out three duties that belong properly to the sovereign and cannot, by their nature, be profitably discharged by private enterprise. The first is defense. The second is justice. The third — and this is the one that speaks to today's story — is the erection and maintenance of those public works and institutions which, though they are of great advantage to society, are of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals. A comprehensive, authoritative, publicly trusted repository of climate observation is precisely such a work. Its benefits are diffuse; its costs are concentrated; no merchant can charge the atmosphere for the data it yields. This is a public good in the strict sense of the term, not a rhetorical one.

When a government withdraws from a duty of this kind, it does not thereby reduce government; it transfers a public cost onto private shoulders, usually less efficient ones. The former NOAA employees — public servants acting, I infer, from something very like the civic sympathy I described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments — have stepped into the breach. But their effort, however valiant, is necessarily inferior to what a well-funded sovereign institution could provide. It will be smaller, less authoritative, more fragile, and more dependent on the continued goodwill of a few individuals. The public is the poorer for the original closure.

I am sometimes recruited by those who wish to shrink every public function in the name of liberty. I ask them to read more carefully. I was the critic of the mercantilist state — of chartered monopolies, of corn bounties, of navigation acts that enriched a narrow producer interest at the consumer's expense. I was not the critic of the state as such. The same hand that I wished to remove from the wool trade I wished very firmly placed on the courthouse, the road, the school, and yes, the observatory. The confusion of these two things — intervention that distorts exchange, and investment that makes exchange possible — is the source of much modern mischief.

There is a further point, which belongs to my moral philosophy rather than my political economy. Data about the natural world — its temperatures, its storms, its long-run tendencies — is the common inheritance of every citizen who must decide how to plant, insure, build, invest, and govern. To destroy or suppress such data is to impoverish the judgment of every person who relies on it. A market in which one party withholds material information from another is not a free market; it is a rigged one. Accurate public knowledge of the physical world is a precondition for honest exchange, not a luxury appended to it.

The institutional question, then, is this: what framework ensures that the public knowledge commons is maintained, updated, and freely accessible? The answer is not heroic voluntarism, admirable as it is in the individuals who practice it. The answer is a sovereign that understands — as I argued it should — that certain investments in shared knowledge are the very foundation on which private enterprise and individual liberty rest. When that sovereign defaults, it does not liberate the market. It weakens it.