Though I speak with the tongues of scientists
             And of educational testers.
             And have not love (of unilocution)
             I am become as sounding brass!

The "Right to Measure" is not one of the rights guaranteed by "The Bill of Rights" of The Consitution. By default, I call it "a rogue right", one of those hidden transgressions on the rights of the many, such as (until recently) "The Right to Smoke Almost Anywhere", or (presently) "The Right to Keep a Semi-Automatic in Your Home".

Although our new Constitution and George Mason's Bill of Rights, which he pushed through, granted citizens many rights, many domains of activity were a Libertarian's delight. For example, until the founding, in 1870, of The National Bureau of Standards (now The National Institute of Standards and Technology), there prevailed what I call "The Right to Measure". This meant that any storekeeper could say what was a gallon of milk, a peck of potatoes, a yard of cloth, etc. The only kind of measures which were not open to the fiat of the storekeeper were the digital measures that derived from counting -- say, dozen eggs. (More on this, below.)

Two of our Founding Fathers (and soon to become Presidents), John Adams (x-y) and Thomas Jefferson (x-y), sketched a "Bill of Weights and Measures", but became too involved in other weighty matters to bring this measure-bill to a vote. The son of Adams, John Quincy Adams (x-y) -- himself the xth President -- continued the work of his father. When defeated, in the Presidential Election of 1825, by Andrew Jackson (x-y), John Quincy Adams returned to Congress as a Representative from Massachusetts. His two principal campaigns were abolition of slavery and passing of a Bill of Weights and Measures. When Adams got a brick through his window, he didn't know whether the assailant was a slave-owner or a storekeeper who resented the Government interfering with what he considered his right to estimate any (analogic-)measure.

The National Bureau of Standards was established in 1970, on a plan adapted from that sketched by Charles Saunders Peirce (incorrectly associated with "the pragmatic philosophy"), although he was never given official credit. Today it is called The National Institute of Standards and Technology. But these metrologists (measurement-scientists), like physics and engineering professors in the universities, ignore the integrity of "The Theory of Measurement Scales", as initiated in 1940 by the Harvard psychophysicist, S. S. Stevens. (During World War II, Stevens applied his background in psychology and physics toward design of an airplane instrument board so that the pilot could see the essentials at a glance, without being diverted from control of the plane.) A Stevens' measurement scale: (1) defining the scale in terms of that mathematical transformation leaving the scale invariant (thus, permutations for a type-scale); (2) clear listing of the "permissible statistics" of a given measurement scale (thus, the average for types is the mode, or most frequent -- not the arithmetic mean, since "you can't add apples and oranges".)

In my listing of these scales in a table, I lead off with my own distinction of a nominal measure since I argue that critical things and events should be uniquely named -- postulating "The First Law of Measurement: LET ALL YOUR NAMES BE UNIVOCAL!" If you read through The Report of the Presidential Commission On the Space-Shuttle Challenger Disaster (1986), the report to Congress about the Challenger Disaster of 1981 -- which killed 8 astronauts and a school teacher -- you will see why. Between the lines, you discover that the good measurements of engineers were wasted when the decision-making (as to take-off) was kicked upstairs to be discombobilated by the buzz-words of managers and beaucrat. For example, information at one point starts out, "All joints are leak checked to a 200 psig stabilization pressure, free of contamination in the seal area and meet O-ring squeeze requirements." But this apparently was translated as "The frenislaw is rigbik and the mome raths outgrabe." And note that the Nobel physicist, Richard Feyman, discovered that those O-rings, when dunked in ice-water, would not pass those "squeeze requirements", which had been conducted at higher temperatures -- and could allow gas to escape and explode! (The one engineer among the final decision-makers was ordered to "Take off your engineer's helmet and vote with us for take-off!")

(As I note elsewhere, I've long had an interest this, having been a member of The American Association of Quality Control Engineers, and having taught quality control engineering many times.)

Unfortunately, another dereliction of The National Institute of Standards and Technology is to prescribe and try to enforce STANDARDS in STATISTICAL MEASUREMENT. As long as this continues, it threatens the very Republic in which other types of measurement are prescribed and enforced by The National Institute.