Two things:

1. I am compelled to sing the praises of random finding of things to read, in this case particularly bathroom reading. What a wonder it is to go for a poo, many times discovering what article or bit of reading someone else has got half way through. I've come across so many interesting and relevant things this way that I would never have sought out myself.

Often, others in the house have obviously churned their way through stuff from a while back that's accumulated in the impromptu reading pile. It occurs to me that I'm not sure whether there's actually a reading rack next to the loo. Let me check... yes, indeed there is! Awesome. I knew that already, surely? Anyway!

2. Today's (RBR) random bathroom reading: Mark Thompson, boss of the BBC, slightly smugly argues that the White Paper on the renewal of the BBC's charter smirks in the jowls of the corporate media. Well, that's sort of what he's argues. (Sorry, couldn't get an online version currently.)

He talks about a day spent talking BBC at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport - "it was weeping and wailing: many of the commercial broadcasters had arrived in full sackcloth and ashes."

Thompson is positively puff-chested about the BBC's public role in furthering the digital nation -

The license fee is a contract between the BBC and, ultimately, the public for the delivery of content that furthers various public purposes.

- and presumes this is why Murdoch et al are being all portent-of-doomy about the whole thing. This is very much their territory, and it would seem the tax-payer is going to continue to fund a state-sponsored battle over that land.

He says:

After two years of public debate, their hopes of overturning the contents of the [white] paper are not great, so they propose instead to limit the BBC's ability to deliver that mission by holding down the license fee. This does not make sense: the right sequence of events is to arrive at a clear set of public purposes and objectives for the BBC - which is what the White Paper does - and then work out how much it will cost for the BBC to deliver. To use the license fee settlement retrospectively to rewrite the white paper not only smacks of desperation but makes a mockery of the years of debate and analysis that led to this piece of settled public policy.

In doing this, no market impact will be felt at all, apparently:

Listening to the critics, you could be forgiven for thinking that negative market impact... was proven fact. // Every digital service we have launched has been subject to a market impact test before being agreed. // There is no systematic evidence of any large-scale negative impact or crowding out by the BBC. There is no independent report that proves it, or even asserts it.

This is all fascinating. Thompson noisily defends the BBC's public service role, while claiming that it actually doesn't affect the private market for media at all - or at least, no 'large scale effect'.

But there must be an effect, and the success of the BBC must at least in part be measured by market share. A finite number of people will, for example, watch TV, and the BBC will have a particular cut of them. (Though it could be argued that a proportion would rather watch nothing if they couldn't get the channel they wanted.)

Its also intriguing how he defends the democratic, king-in-parliament process into the continuation of the service. It strikes me as a wonderful comparison to the usual metric for judging the success of a commercial venture, or thinking about how a commercial medium would be developed.

But it leaves me mostly confused. If I am actually to compare different economic and organisational structures, looking for ways of comparing their mix of purposive design and spontaneous order, I'm actually, really, properly going to have to pick apart cases like this. They seem to offer so much promise, but - like a Saxony forest subject the regimented eye of the scientific state - I wonder how I can approach it without rendering the subject entirely desolate.

Its so complicated! If we had a referendum on the license fee tomorrow, would people really prefer the current system to, say, giving the money to whatever channel they preferred, or buying specific programmes? And when Thompson makes the case that the license fee will become less of a burden on the poorest, is this redistribution a good thing? What are the range of ways that you could organise payment for this kind of thing? Would the BBC or the government really entrust the public they're so keen to provide with a public service to make effective choices - or does public service mean a patronising paternalism? Is the alternative just TV gruel / lowest common denominator / race to the bottom?

Maybe the question of markets = freedom / central planning = serfdom is a little more straightforward, because the question isn't so fraught with the mundane. In today's Britain, where we're currently trying to 'marketise' everything, how do you go about coming up with metrics that can help us adjudicate on all of them? Or can't you? Can we only go on a case by case basis, the BBC and the NHS being as different as a beetle and game of twister?

And why is it that questions breed so rapidly? What's a question's natural predator, and where did they all go?