[extropy-chat] Three-quarters of N. American's support stemcellresearch

[Gregory Propf]

J. Andrew Rogers wrote:

>
> My point was essentially that this hand-wringing is a classic 
> historical myopia.  When granting the government abilities, powers, 
> and resources, you should never ask what your friends and comrades 
> would do with such things but what your enemies would.  Because 
> eventually, your enemies will be in a position to utilize such things 
> as *they* see fit.  Bad people frequently misuse powers granted by the 
> foolish people to long gone benevolent people. 

These are nice smug libertarian type positions.  Even assuming they are 
correct we must take into account the following

1) There is zero likelihood of getting the government out of the 
research business anytime before the singularity.

2) The threat of a hovering legislative ban combined with the lack of 
government monies will effectively stifle research in what is probably 
the single most promising field in medicine right now.  This is disastrous.

>
> No, the only mistake here was thinking that it was a good idea to let 
> politicians decide what kind of research gets funded in the first 
> place.  That was just idiotic.  For similar reasons, having any kind 
> of global organization, like the UN, regulate this kind of thing is 
> profoundly stupid as it eliminates the escape hatch of a competitive 
> market in case the politicians in one sovereign entity all get 
> together and decide to be imbeciles, which happens more often than it 
> should. 

And of course the same religious conservatives who lobbied for the stem 
cell funding ban will be pushing for this.  The hypocrisy of condemning 
the UN as the biblical "beast" when it doesn't do what they want, like 
invading Iraq on Shrub's schedule, while using it to push for a global 
stem cell ban won't even occur to them.