June 19, 2007
The Problem with Govt. Research
Suppose President Hillary Clinton and the Democratic 111th Congress get their wish. Much of health care is nationalized, price controls are placed on drugs, and the private pharmaceutical sector is severely reduced in capitalization.
I'm assured by my lefty friends that government research will take up the slack as it has in Europe. While we may have led the way, we cannot deny that some important discoveries have come from such systems.
I'll rebut this without naming an Austrian economist (though the fingers are itching). Even if the same magnitude of money could be directed, I do not trust the decisions that government would make. Research in a powerful Senator's state would receive better funding and the disease of a popular movie star or media figure would be addressed over other choices.
Worse still, the decisions would be made politically -- is that really what anybody wants? I suggest the finest proof for my critique is found in the battle over embryonic stem cell research. Michael Cook has a TCSDaily column today that documents opposition to promising new research that I find to be nakedly political.
Stem cell research has been a great issue for the Democrats. Michael J. Fox asked voters in 2006 to elect Claire McCaskill and Sherrod Brown to the US Senate, where they could overturn those troglodyte right to lifers who would rather see Michael J. Fox suffer than use a clump of cells that will be destroyed anyway. (I paraphrase only a little).
Now that there seems to be a breakthrough:
Only a few days ago an article in the leading journal Nature brought amazing news. A Japanese team at Kyoto University has discovered how to reprogram skin cells so that they "dedifferentiate" into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell. From this they can be morphed, theoretically, into any cell in the body, a property called pluripotency. It could be the Holy Grail of stem cell science: a technique that is both feasible and unambiguously ethical.
Some scientists are opposed which strikes me as fair. Hay--I mean most people would admit innovation is best served when many people pursue their own beliefs, and if they think that embryonic research is farther along, or shows more promise, have at it.
What concerns me is the opposition from Rep Rahm Emmanuel the famed molecular biologist Democratic Congressional Caucus Chairman. Emmanuel said "It is ironic that every time we vote on this legislation, all of a sudden there is a major scientific discovery that basically says, 'You don't have to do [embryonic] stem cell research.' " .
The Democrats are locked into supporting a line of research for the simple reason that President Bush doesn't like it. This does not strike me as an efficient decision mechanism. And it will only get worse when they control even more of the purse strings.
I was opposed to the stem cell research bill because I did not believe that such research needed federal funding.
Why doesn't Rep. Emmanuel have the same skeptical belief regarding global warming?
The simple fact is that federal spending can be pointed to by those in elected office as evidence of what they did to help. However, if the results of the spending prove dubious, there is little discussion of the spending at all. However, it is much harder for politicians who opposed federal spending on something that turned out to be ineffective from saying, "look what I protected you, the taxpayer, from funding."
Posted by: Everyday Economist at June 19, 2007 3:08 PM | What do you think? [1]