The Irony of the "First Veto"
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President Bush's veto of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research using blastocysts that are slated for destruction anyway is of course the entirely correct course of action — but for the entirely wrong reason.
Demand creates its own supply. Where there is a need (i.e., a potential market) for the fruits of such research, private "greedy" capitalists will undertake it. And even where there are potential shortfalls (e.g., rare diseases, orphan drugs), the non-profit sector, relying on charitable support, can pick up the slack.
The government can never catalyze discovery; it can only forcibly misallocate resources away from where people actually want them to be deployed.
The President, meanwhile, sees none of this:
More thoughts at To the People, Below the Beltway.
Senators voted 63 to 37 to approve a House-passed bill that would pour millions of dollars into a field of medical research that is promising — but also controversial because it requires destroying human embryos to extract the cells.There should indeed be no federal funding of stem cell research — because there should be no federal funding of any medical research of any kind.
Bush announced in his first nationally televised address, on Aug. 9, 2001, that he would ban government funding for research using embryonic stem cell colonies created after that date, and he has vowed to cast his first presidential veto to block the legislation rescinding his executive order.
Demand creates its own supply. Where there is a need (i.e., a potential market) for the fruits of such research, private "greedy" capitalists will undertake it. And even where there are potential shortfalls (e.g., rare diseases, orphan drugs), the non-profit sector, relying on charitable support, can pick up the slack.
The government can never catalyze discovery; it can only forcibly misallocate resources away from where people actually want them to be deployed.
The President, meanwhile, sees none of this:
This bill would support the taking of innocent human life of the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our society needs to respect, so I vetoed it.Instead, he is yet again pandering to his base, the evangelical ignoranti who wallow in anti-science cloaked as "choosing life." (Those who can distinguish between an amorphous clump of cells and a bona fide human fetus are, to the Bush base, a major component of The Others Who Are Ruining America™.) The fact that not a single (proto-)life will be saved by this veto, meanwhile, is a pesky irrelevancy. Go figure.
More thoughts at To the People, Below the Beltway.
Posted by Kip on
19 July 2006
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