QandO

March 02, 2004

The politicization of whatever
Posted by Jon Henke

David Bernstein makes a fundamental point....

Every once in a while, I'll notice a liberal blogger querying why libertarian bloggers, who, after all, tend to be rationalistic, scientifically oriented, and not especially religious folks, aren't up in arms about the Bush Administration's politicization of science, generally on behalf of the Christian Right ....

Nevertheless, there is a limit to actual libertarian outrage for a simple reason: unlike liberals, who expect better from their government, libertarians expect this sort of nonsense as a result of government funding of science. Libertarians would, in fact, be surprised if government funding of science did not lead to its politicization, if not by Bush than by someone else; the sorts of thing the Bush administration has been doing, are, in fact, what libertarians have warned liberals who support government subsidies for scientific ventures about for years.

To those who have supported massive government subsidies for science and social science, and are now tearing their hair out as government plays fast and loose with the scientific process and threatens scientific progress, I say, "Well, d'uh, what exactly did you expect?"

We hear, ad naseum, from both Parties: "everything will be just fine, as long as the President does exactly what I think he should do."

Uh huh. Except, in the real world, the President is going to be doing exactly the opposite of what you think he should do about half the time.

I can't cite this Billy Beck quote enough....

They're punks, who would feed your ass into a shredder for "society", as soon as they got their hands on the machine that they've just woken up to whining about since January of 2001.

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