There are other ways to find out the what is important, ways that are less prone to errors, ESPECIALLY for research...
My point was that selling the IP instead of giving it away is revenue neutral to society (and, in fact, a positive to the taxpayers who are not buying the IP) and so selling it does not decrease welfare and may well improve it if it provides some data to the agency on what the users of their research value. This is entirely unlike what happens with NSF-funded research which is given away to journals who charge a fortune to read it. In this latter case (unless you think that peer-review is incredibly valuable, which no one besides the publishers seem to believe) the overall effect is welfare reducing.
He didn't say it is a way to find what's important, he said it is an important signal to find what people value enough to spend their money on.
No, he didn't, he said:
> is an important signal as to where they should spend their research time
anyone who has looked at basic research knows that immediate commercialization potential is a horrible guide for where to spend time.
As a quick example, would you pay for someone to research the immune systems of sharks and camels? No technology transfer office can sell a description of how the immune systems work. It seems ridiculous. But after years were spent researching these topics, describing them in detail in the publicly available literature, companies have taken features of these systems and built products based on them.
The goal of government-funded research is not to run a business, directing research into immediate commercialization, it is to do basic science that would not be funded by companies because it does not appear prima facie to have commercial application.
Sez you. Basic science/pure research is NOT the goal of all government research spending. There happens to be some funding put in place for basic research by Congress (much of the NSF and NIH budgets, for instance) but there is also purpose-driven research that is not "basic science." The department of defense is one of the largest spenders on research in the US government, but much of their research is not "basic science," and even if you termed it that, they are not doing it for the love of knowledge. I assume the NSA is more like this than it is like the NSF.