Capitalist market economies accomplish more good accidentally than any army of bureaucratic do-gooders on the public payroll.

One small example of particular importance to me: the Internet Movie Data Base. This modest fan site was bought out some years ago by Amazon, which has turned it into an absolutely invaluable yet free resource. The occassional sale through the Amazon links justifies to them what in practical terms looks to me like a huge public service. Amazon foots the bill to continually draft and maintain hundreds of thousands of densely informative pages, constantly expanding, making a great deal of valuable and even educational information freely available to anyone with a modem.

Far bigger and more ambitious plans are now afoot at Google. They have entered into agreements to digitize and make freely available millions of books from the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library for starters.

Basically, Google has become so rich through their initial public stock offering that they can easily afford to offer this expensive gesture of public service. The founders of the company can reasonably justify spending perhaps as much as $200 million to productively indulge their own idealistic goals and feelings of high mindedness. Hey, against the tens of billions they've raised, they can write this off on the books over a few years as public relations. Plus, they might manage to generate a few ad dollars on the side, and not even end up spending much money anyway.

Of course, Google can't be allowed to have this high ground as the benevolent world wide public benefactor of education and intellectualism. Now, Yahoo and MSN and AOL will have to scramble to compete with free, as they have with their web based email accounts.

Aren't market economics great?