Posted by
RepublicanEvangelist on Monday, November 10, 2008 11:11:42 PM
The headline from the Times of London says it all
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5122336.ece .
A President Obama is paying back two of his key constituents : the environmentalists and the abortion lobby. I am a Christian who believes life begins at conception. I am also a man who's wife lost four babies to miscarriage before our daughter was born. Not one of those miscarriages was considered or referred to as a fetus by us or anyone else. We lost our babies. To me there is something fundamentally wrong to sacrifice the young to preserve the old. It is like the movie Soylent Green in reverse
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/ . If you haven't seen, the movie takes place in the future where the world has run out of food so old people were sent off to be put down and turned into food. Even if embryonic stem cell research yielded a cure (it hasn't although adult stem cell research has proved promising), I would still be against federal funding of it on moral grounds. I am also against government funding of research on libertarian grounds as well. As a general rule, things that cannot be funded by the private sector using the market are probably not promising in the first place. Private investors want to make money and they put their money into things that have upside potential. Why is it that liberal talk radio must be subsidized and conservative talk radio survives on private money? The reason is no one wants to listen to liberal talk radio and it needs to be subsidized. Here is a private sector example of subsidies not working: the WNBA. No one goes to the games at least compared to their male counterpart. I would bet money that more women attend NBA games than WNBA games. They are subsidized by their male counterpart because they cannot survive on their own. This subsidy I don't object to because it is private money. If the average NBA fan doesn't mind paying an extra 5 bucks or so a ticket to subsidize something they aren't watching, it is none of mine or anyone else's business. With government funding of research, they are replacing the private sector and the market with bureaucrats. One more example of government subsidizing inefficiencies, the switchover to digital television which will happen in February of 2009. In case you didn't know, the government is sending out coupons worth $40 to people to keep their old televisions working. That is right, the taxpayers are subsidizing technology that is over 60 years old. I am sure it cost the government substantially more than $40 per coupon to administer the program. Government involvement in the arts has mostly been a disaster for the arts. Why is it that the best classical music being made these days, according to Dennis Prager, is being done as soundtracks? This is because if something is good, for the most part, they can sell it. If something is bad, you need a government subsidy to keep it going, like at a university. Do you think classical music would have been as great if they money were handed out by German bureaucrats? Do you think the great painters would have produced such great art if they were existing on government subsidies and didn't have to please people? Just remember that Shakespeare sold tickets to people at the Globe and therefore had to produce something they wanted to buy.