By Michael F. Cannon
Today, the Cato Institute released “Scientific Misconduct: The Manipulation of Evidence for Political Advocacy in Health Care and Climate Policy,” by George Avery of Purdue University.
Avery points to a troubling provision of the Senate-passed health care bill that Democrats are trying to get through the House:
In a section creating a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to conduct comparative-effectiveness research, the bill allows the withholding of funding to any institution where a researcher publishes findings not “within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence,” a vague authorization that creates a tremendous tool that can be used to ensure self-censorship and conformity with bureaucratic preferences….As AcademyHealth notes, “Such language to restrict scientific freedom is unprecedented and likely unconstitutional.”
He warns that government bureaucrats aren’t likely to let that power go unused.
In July 2007, AcademyHealth, a professional association of health services and health policy researchers, published results of a study of sponsor restrictions on the publication of research results. Surprisingly, the results revealed that more than three times as many researchers had experienced problems with government funders related to prior review, editing, approval, and dissemination of research results. In addition, a higher percentage of respondents had turned down government sponsorship opportunities due to restrictions than had done the same with industrial funding. Much of the problem was linked to an “increasing government custom and culture of controlling the flow of even non-classified information.”
Avery observes that such power enables bureaucrats to engage in “data manipulation to cover inconvenient findings,” much as the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia appear to have done. Indeed, he points to evidence of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials suppressing an, ahem, inconvenient internal debate.
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By Ilya Shapiro
I previously blogged about the NRA’s misbegotten motion, which the Supreme Court granted, to carve 10 minutes of oral argument time away from the petitioners in McDonald v. Chicago. Essentially, there was no discernable reason for the motion other than to ensure that the NRA could claim some credit for the eventual victory, and thus boost its fundraising.
Well, having argued that petitioners’ counsel Alan Gura insufficiently covered the argument that the Second Amendment should be “incorporated” against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, the NRA has now filed a brief that fails even to reference the four biggest cases regarding incorporation and substantive due process. That is, the NRA reply brief contains no mention of Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), Benton v. Maryland (1969), Duncan v. Louisiana (1968), or Palko v. Connecticut (1937). (The NRA did cite those cases in its opening brief.) What is more, it also lacks a discussion of Judge O’Scannlain’s magisterial Ninth Circuit opinion in Nordyke v. King (2009), which the Supreme Court might as well cut and paste regardless of which constitutional provision it uses to extend the right to keep and bear arms to the states!
I should add that the petitioners’ reply brief does cite all of those aforementioned cases (as well as the “Keeping Pandora’s Box Sealed” law review article I co-authored with Josh Blackman). I leave it to the reader to determine whether it is Alan Gura or the NRA who is better positioned to argue substantive due process — or any other part of the McDonald case.
For more on the rift between the McDonald petitioners and the NRA, see this story in today’s Washington Post (in which I’m quoted, full disclosure, after a lengthy interview I gave the reporter last week).
(Full disclosure again: Alan Gura is a friend of mine and of Cato, and I suppose I should also say that I’ve participated in NRA-sponsored events in the past.)
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By Daniel J. Mitchell
Ronald Reagan was born 99 years ago. To remember what made him special, here are a couple of videos.
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By David Boaz
Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer is profiled in the Washington Examiner’s Sunday “Credo” column. He talks about the meaning of freedom and about people who have risked their lives to protect the rights of others, and offers some interesting thoughts when asked about “moral relativism”:
You say that for many people, the idea of right and wrong has been degraded in our culture. Why? When did that happen?
The growth of moral relativism is an interesting thing to chart. Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago argued that it was an unintended consequence of a positive development, which was the integration of different races and religions. As that happened, it became the easiest way to tell schoolchildren not to fight by saying, “Everyone and everything is as good as everything else.” It is an easier route to say that there are no moral truths, but the outcome is not more mutual respect. It undermines the foundation of mutual respect.
Moral relativism was a lazy shortcut for a pluralistic society. A better approach is to say you should respect others because they’re human beings, and because they have rights.
Find the whole article here or see it in newspaper-page format on page 34 of the digital edition.
And buy Tom Palmer’s Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice here.
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By David Boaz
Charles Krauthammer writes about “liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate” and the conceit that “Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.” He has plenty of contemporary examples, but he also recalls one from a few years ago:
It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.
Nozick, of course, was a libertarian, not a conservative, as the more insightful obituary by the philosopher Alan Ryan in the British Independent notes: the book’s ”criticism of social conservatism is at least as devastating as its criticism of the redistributive welfare state.” But Krauthammer is right to note the casual assumption by the New York Times that conservatism desperately needed ”philosophical justification.”
Sunday’s Washington Post contains a related article by political scientist Gerard Alexander: “Why are liberals so condescending?”
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