Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich

By ARTHUR LAFFER and STEPHEN MOORE

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we're seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit.

Chad Crowe

Mr. Quinn and other tax-raising governors have been emboldened by recent studies by left-wing groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that suggest that "tax increases, particularly tax increases on higher-income families, may be the best available option." A recent letter to New York Gov. David Paterson signed by 100 economists advises the Empire State to "raise tax rates for high income families right away."

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

Martin Feldstein, Harvard economist and former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-authored a famous study in 1998 called "Can State Taxes Redistribute Income?" This should be required reading for today's state legislators. It concludes: "Since individuals can avoid unfavorable taxes by migrating to jurisdictions that offer more favorable tax conditions, a relatively unfavorable tax will cause gross wages to adjust. . . . A more progressive tax thus induces firms to hire fewer high skilled employees and to hire more low skilled employees."

More recently, Barry W. Poulson of the University of Colorado last year examined many factors that explain why some states grew richer than others from 1964 to 2004 and found "a significant negative impact of higher marginal tax rates on state economic growth." In other words, soaking the rich doesn't work. To the contrary, middle-class workers end up taking the hit.

Finally, there is the issue of whether high-income people move away from states that have high income-tax rates. Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average. Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax filers in the years after they tried to soak the rich.

This result was all the more remarkable given that these were years when the stock market boomed and Wall Street gains were in the trillions of dollars. Examining data from a 2008 Princeton study on the New Jersey tax hike on the wealthy, we found that there were 4,000 missing half-millionaires in New Jersey after that tax took effect. New Jersey now has one of the largest budget deficits in the nation.

We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.

Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states "race to the bottom" and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.

They're wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation -- even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores.

Or consider the fiasco of New Jersey. In the early 1960s, the state had no state income tax and no state sales tax. It was a rapidly growing state attracting people from everywhere and running budget surpluses. Today its income and sales taxes are among the highest in the nation yet it suffers from perpetual deficits and its schools rank among the worst in the nation -- much worse than those in New Hampshire. Most of the massive infusion of tax dollars over the past 40 years has simply enriched the public-employee unions in the Garden State. People are fleeing the state in droves.

One last point: States aren't simply competing with each other. As Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently told us, "Our state is competing with Germany, France, Japan and China for business. We'd better have a pro-growth tax system or those American jobs will be out-sourced." Gov. Perry and Texas have the jobs and prosperity model exactly right. Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined. And Texas is the only state other than Georgia and North Dakota that is cutting taxes this year.

The Texas economic model makes a whole lot more sense than the New Jersey model, and we hope the politicians in California, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota and New York realize this before it's too late.

Mr. Laffer is president of Laffer Associates. Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal. They are co-authors of "Rich States, Poor States" (American Legislative Exchange Council, 2009).

Lady Justice is Blind, not "Empathetic"

Lady Justice is Blind, Not 'Empathetic'

By Carol Platt Liebau

Preparing to fill the Supreme Court seat soon to be vacated by David Souter, President Obama has announced that he wants a judge with "empathy." According to the President, his nominee must understand "justice" to be "about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives -- whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation."

As a former constitutional law professor, surely the President understands that possessing "empathy" in the abstract is an absolutely meaningless criterion for a judge. When a President emphasizes the importance of "empathy," the more proper question becomes not whether a particular judge has empathy, but rather, for whom? After all, empathizing with a woman who wants a late-term abortion necessitates a certain lack of empathy for her unborn baby. Empathy for accused criminals can feel like something very different to their victims.

In fact, by invoking a comfortably-undefined "empathy" as the indispensable quality in a justice, President Obama is deftly deploying warm, fuzzy rhetoric to signal that he intends to select a justice with a very specific left-wing policy agenda. Looking for a nominee who is concerned about whether people "can make a living and care for their families" means he is seeking a judge who will side with unions or plaintiffs against businesses. Nominating a jurist who worries about whether people "feel safe in their homes" means finding a person who will greet with skepticism the claims of law enforcement in search and seizure (or national security) cases. And selecting a judge pledged to make people feel "welcome in their own nation" means naming a justice with the politically correct views on hot button social issues ranging from gay marriage to affirmative action to immigration to removing faith from the public square.

Barack Obama won the election fair and square, so there would be no grounds for objection if he were listing the criteria for a nominee to a policy-making position. But he isn't. He is selecting a jurist, and therefore is supposed to be seeking someone who will uphold the rule of law by deciding cases impartially, based only on the law and the facts before him - and nothing else.

Instead, Obama wants a policymaker sitting on the Supreme Court - in fact, a super-lawmaker on steroids. He's looking for a judge willing to engage in an enterprise that has nothing to do with the actual process of adjudication - that is, interpreting the laws that have been passed by a legislature and signed by an executive. Rather, Obama's ideal nominee will eagerly seek to participate in the inherently political enterprise of deciding cases based - not on the Constitution and laws - but on whether s/he personally feels one particular outcome would be preferable to another. That's known as results-oriented jurisprudence. And it's dangerous.

The kind of judging the President approves is completely subjective. Justices pluck a phrase from the Constitution and imbue it with a new, hitherto- unimagined meaning in order to reach a liberal result consistent with their own personal political or social sympathies. By such formulations, the concept of "liberty" can be expanded at a Justice's own whim to authorize constitutional protection for everything from assorted abortion rights to gay sex (as, ironically, Reagan nominee Anthony Kennedy has done over the years). And in the future, if President Obama's justice has anything to say about it, "liberty" will be extended even farther to serve as a rationale for imposing gay marriage, eliminating restrictions on partial birth abortion, and validating any other trend du jour that the left embraces.

Eventually, should a Republican president start nominating justices based primarily on their "empathy," surely even liberals will realize that it is dangerous to install a judiciary that relies on feeling, rather than reason, as the indispensable guide to judicial decision making. After all, a judge's empathy extends most predictably to parties to whom s/he relates or with whom s/he sympathizes personally or politically. As such, relying on "empathy" undermines citizens' confidence that all will be equal before the bar of justice - and that adjudication itself will be impartial. That assurance is essential for a free people to remain free.

There is a reason that Lady Justice wears a blindfold. Justice is supposed to be blind to the race, gender, finances, politics - and every other "empathy"-eliciting - characteristic of those who seek it in good faith. Apparently, it's too much to hope that figuratively, at least, President Obama's justice will be, too.

Andrew Breitbart is a Great American

Why the pass fellas?

Hypocrisy rears its ugly head. To reiterate Breitbart's essential question, "Why are gay-activists giving Obama, Biden, Hispanics, and Blacks a free pass when it comes to gay-marriage, but crucifying the religious right?"

I'll give you a hint... there is no good reason. Read on and make your own decision.

"Greetings, from a poolside cabana at a trendy boutique hotel in Santa Monica. Oh, how I love these overpriced overnight stays. The sleek designs. The ambient music. The uniformly attractive and stylishly dressed young staffs. The plush beds with sheets of an absurdly high thread count. Weird faucets and weirder sinks. I bask in the attention to detail. W is my favorite letter. Philippe Starck is a personal hero.

As a realist, I've built into my mindset that the majority heterosexual population is less than exclusively responsible for creating this and countless other high-end consumer and artistic experiences. Plus, I have a ton of wonderful gay friends - even ones "married" and with children. If gay activists created "A Day Without a Gay" (as they promoted Dec. 10 of last year), I'd be the first to cry "uncle" - even before Cher. So, accordingly, I make philosophical and political accommodations. I'm - as the MTV generation says - "gay-friendly."

But lately, color me "gay perturbed." "Gay-friendly," a term once manifestly redundant, now seems a glaring contradiction.

The gay political-activist community - in my view, a small minority of left-wing agitators acting on behalf of the whole - has been on a binge of bad public behavior, and I'm not referring to the bare-buttocked-chaps look and inappropriately placed sparklers during "pride" parades.

The Mormon community was recently targeted for its support of Proposition 8, the pro-traditional-marriage initiative in California. Donors to the cause were isolated and even exposed on online maps. Businesses were targeted. People lost their jobs.

The latest high-profile act on behalf of the "community" came from the Miss USA pageant. Perez Hilton, the wildly popular Internet gossip and celebrity hit man, somehow got himself placed as a judge of female beauty at the Donald Trump-sponsored event. Not to be judgmental, but the apprentice behind that hire should be fired. But I digress.

At the point in the pageant when the young lovelies are asked questions by those who pick the winners, the flamboyantly gay man (who by day pries into the private lives of stars and scrawls human DNA-spewing phalli under the faces of those he doesn't like) asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, whether she approved of gay marriage.

It was a setup.

Miss Prejean is a student at San Diego Christian College - the kind of place activist gay leftists are at war with, where Christians preach what they practice.

"Out of all the topics I studied up on, I dreaded that one: I prayed I would not be asked about gay marriage. If I had any other question, I know I would have won," she told Fox News.

Perez Hilton, whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., affirmed Miss California's fear: "She lost it because of that question. She was definitely the front-runner before that." Miss Prejean received zero points from Perez Hilton, who put her on the spot defending her faith. She finished in second place.

On display at the Miss USA event was the activist left's pageant of selective bullying, a concerted strategy to go after low-hanging fruit like Mormons. But the left leaves off its hit list members in good standing of its normal coalition - its "rainbow" coalition. In California, one of the gayest places on the map, blacks and Hispanics - who disproportionately disapprove of same-sex marriage - get a stunning pass from outraged proponents of gay marriage.

Since 9/11, the highly organized gay left has also been deafeningly silent on Islam's anti-modern approach to homosexuality - let alone same-sex unions. The mullahs in Iran somehow get a major pass while the director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento is targeted for ruin. This contradiction is not subtle. Indeed, it's obvious and pathetic.

In fact, in the beauty contest that was the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama - the left's hand-tailored candidate and an icon of "hope" in the gay community - like his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., shares Miss California's stance on gay marriage.

"I'm a Christian," Mr. Obama told the Chicago Tribune. "And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

Why the pass, fellas?

I fear the vicious and hypocritical path that the activist gay left is headed on will eventually be met with a backlash. If it already hasn't. Activism goes both ways and somehow the majority has a way of having its say. Unless the gay community polices itself better and registers its displeasure against these pitiful and selective acts of political retribution, many tolerant Americans who hold the same beliefs on marriage as Mr. Obama and the Dalai Lama are going to begin to register their displeasure at the voting booth and through consumer boycotts against those who employ or support the thuggish tactics of Perez Hilton and his ilk.

"A Day Without a Gay" may become a prolonged and mostly unspoken reality. Trust me, I don't want to throw out all my John Waters DVDs. But if push comes to shove, and if the bullying continues, I'm more than willing to stay at a Ramada."

-Andrew Breitbart

Word up to my brother Vaclav

President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus

PRAGUE -- I am surprised at how so many people nowadays in Europe, the United States and elsewhere have come to support policies underpinned by hysteria over global warming, particularly cap-and-trade legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and subsidies for "green" energy sources.

I am convinced that this is a misguided strategy -- not only because of the uncertainty about the dangers that global warming might pose, but also because of the certainty of the damage that these proposed policies aimed at mitigation will impose.

I was invited to address this issue at a recent conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. My audience included business leaders who hoped to profit from cap-and-trade policies, subsidies for renewable energy and "green" jobs. My advice to them was to not get caught up in the hysteria.

Europe is several years ahead of the US in implementing policies intended to mitigate global warming. All of the European Union's member countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol and adopted a wide range of policies to lower their emissions and meet their Kyoto targets.

These policies include a cap-and-trade initiative known as the Emissions Trading Scheme, steep fuel taxes and ambitious programs to build windmills and other renewable energy projects. These policies were undertaken at a time when the EU economy was doing well and -- one hopes -- with full knowledge that they would have significant costs.

With the global financial crisis and the sudden economic downturn, two things are becoming clear. First, it will be difficult to afford these expensive new sources of energy. Second, energy rationing policies, like cap-and-trade, will be a permanent drag on economic activity. Ironically, emissions have not decreased as a result of these policies, but are doing so now as the world economy moves into recession.

This is not a surprise to someone like me, having been actively involved in my country's transition from communism to a free society and market economy. The old, outmoded heavy industries that were the pride of our Communist regime were shut down -- practically overnight -- because they could not survive the opening of the economy. The result was a dramatic decline in CO2 emissions.

The secret behind the cut in emissions was economic decline. As the economies of the Czech Republic and other Central and Eastern European countries were rebuilt and began to grow again, emissions have naturally started to increase. It should be clear to everyone that there is a very strong correlation between economic growth and energy use.

So I am amazed to see people going along with the currently fashionable political argument that policies like cap-and-trade, government mandates and subsidies for renewable energy can actually benefit an economy. It is claimed that the government, working together with business, will create "a new energy economy," that the businesses involved will profit and that everyone will be better off.

This is a fantasy. Cap-and-trade can only work by raising energy prices. Consumers who are forced to pay higher prices for energy will have less money to spend on other things. While the individual companies that provide the higher-priced "green" energy may do well, the net economic effect will be negative.

It is necessary to look at the bigger picture. Profits can be made when energy is rationed or subsidized, but only within an economy operating at lower, or even negative, growth rates. This means that over the longer term, everyone will be competing for a piece of a pie that is smaller than it would have been without energy rationing.

This does not auger well either for growth or for working our way out of today's crisis.

Václav Klaus is president of the Czech Republic, which holds the presidency of the Council of Ministers of the European Union until June 2009. He is the author of "Blue Planet in Green Shackles -- What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?"

Morality and Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

Absolutely fabulous article.

Well written, well reasoned.

As Mr. Wehner points out, coercive interrogation techniques are not inherently morally abhorrent. It's not self-evident that waterboarding (or other interrogation technique) is wrong for the very simple fact that anyone would struggle to decide whether or not to perform it if lives (tens, hundreds, maybe thousands) hung in the balance. "Self-evident" means that it would need no argument. It would be perfectly clear on its own. You would be hard-pressed to compare waterboarding with, say, rape, on the morality heirarchy.

Enough of me. Read the article

"The issue of the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques involve several inter-related questions.

There is, first of all, the matter of morality. Critics of enhanced interrogation techniques have taken to saying that Americans don’t torture, period – meaning in this instance that we do not engage in coercive interrogation techniques ranging from sleep deprivation to prolonged loud noise and/or bright lights to waterboarding. Anyone who holds the opposite view is a moral cretin and guilty of “arrant inhumanity.” Or so the argument goes.

But this posture begins to come apart under examination. For one thing, the issue of “torture” itself needs to be put in a moral context and on a moral continuum. Waterboarding is a very nasty technique for sure – but it is considerably different (particularly in the manner administered by the CIA) than, say, mutilation with electric drills, rape, splitting knees, or forcing a terrorist to watch his children suffer and die in order to try to elicit information from him. Waterboarding is a technique that has been routinely used in the training of some U.S. military personnel – and which the journalist Christopher Hitchens endured. I certainly wouldn’t want to undergo waterboarding – but while a very harsh technique, it is one that was applied in part because it would do far less damage to a person than other techniques. It is also surely relevant that waterboarding was not used randomly and promiscuously, but rather on three known terrorists. And of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program, according to Michael Hayden, President Bush’s last CIA director, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey – and of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in the memos on enhanced interrogation.

Morality also involves balancing ends and means. It is therefore relevant to take into account the possible benefits from the act of coercive interrogation techniques. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, during a 2004 hearing on the subject of torture, put it this way. “There are times when we all get into high dudgeon” on this matter, Schumer said, but that we “ought to be reasonable about this.” He then added this:

I think there are probably very few people in this [Congressional hearing] room or in America who would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake. Take the hypothetical: if we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city and we believe that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most Senators, maybe all, would do what you have to do. So it’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the fox hole, it’s a very different deal. And I respect, I think we all respect the fact that the President’s in the fox-hole every day. So he can hardly be blamed for asking you, or his White House counsel or the Department of Defense, to figure out when it comes to torture, what the law allows and when the law allows it, and what there is permission to do.

Senator Schumer noted, “We certainly don’t want torture to be used willy-nilly… But we also don’t want the situation like I mentioned in Chicago to preclude it.”

Apropos of Schumer’s comments, critics of enhanced interrogation techniques need to wrestle with a set of questions they like to avoid: if you knew using waterboarding against a known terrorist may well elicit information that would stop a massive attack on an American city, would you still insist it never be used? Do you oppose the use of waterboarding if it would save a thousand innocent lives? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? What exactly is the point, if any, at which you believe waterboarding might be justified? I simply don’t accept that those who answer “never” are taking a morally superior stand to those who answer “sometimes, in extremely rare circumstances and in very limited cases.”

Let’s consider the more common cases that don’t involve a “ticking time bomb scenario.” How might you react if you found yourself in government in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, in which you knew al Qaeda was responsible for the strike and knew it was intent on doing far more damage to America. You captured a high-value terrorist who, if you elicit information from him, might well provide you with details that are essential to preventing a future attack and mass death. You are told enhanced interrogation techniques, if employed properly and under guidance, will work; and will probably save many thousands of innocent lives. In that case many people would, I think, (reluctantly) give the green light to coercive techniques – which is exactly what Congress, including Democratic Members of Congress, did.

On the substantive level, there is the question of the efficacy of enhanced interrogation techniques. There is an intense debate surrounding this matter, but we can certainly say that respected members of the intelligence world insist that innocent Americans are today alive because we employed a set of coercive interrogation techniques. According to Hayden and Mukasey, “As late as 2006, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of Al Qaeda came from those interrogations.” Former CIA Director George Tenet said, “I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than [what] the FBI, the [CIA], and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.” And former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has said, “We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened.”

Stuart Taylor, the politically moderate and intellectually honest columnist for National Journal, put it this way:

The fashionable assumption that coercive interrogation (up to and including torture) never saved a single life makes it easy to resolve what otherwise would be an agonizing moral quandary. The same assumption makes it even easier for congressional Democrats, human-rights activists, and George W. Bush-hating avengers to call for prosecuting and imprisoning the former president and his entire national security team, including their lawyers. . . . But there is a body of evidence suggesting that brutal interrogation methods may indeed have saved lives, perhaps a great many lives — and that renouncing those methods may someday end up costing many, many more.

It seems unlikely that asking a jihadist his surname, first name and rank, date of birth, army, regimental, personal or serial number, or failing this, equivalent information – which is what the Geneva Conventions say ought to apply to prisoners of war but not, historically, to unlawful enemy combatants – would elicit as much information as coercive interrogation techniques. Dennis Blair, Obama's national intelligence director, admitted to his staff that “high value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding” of al Qaeda. (Once Blair’s memo was revealed, he added this caveat: “There is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.") And thanks to Taylor, we know that in 2002 the current Attorney General, Eric Holder, said that terrorists are not "entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention" and that we need to "find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located."

I am not one who believes that there is no cost to pursuing enhanced interrogation techniques. In debating policies, especially those that reach the president, there are costs and benefits to consider. So it’s certainly possible that our employment of enhanced interrogation techniques was used as a recruitment tool for militant jihadists; if so, that needs to be weighed against the plots you break up and the innocent lives you save. Also, many members of the military oppose waterboarding because they feel it stains the reputation of America and endangers our own servicemen and women (though it’s hard to accept the argument that al Qaeda would be less sadistic if we had not used coercive interrogation techniques; after all, they were beheading innocent people even before it was known the U.S. used water-boarding). These are not silly objections. Beyond that, most of us instinctively pull back from using harsh interrogation techniques and certainly torture. Given the double-obligation of morality and law, we should begin with the presumption that waterboarding shouldn’t be utilized and then set a very high bar for anyone who would argue that it might be acceptable in very limited instances.

But that is, in fact, what seems to have occurred. And so I do not accept for a moment that the last eight years constitute a “dark chapter” in our history. Quite the opposite. Michael Gerson points out that our history is replete with actions – the firebombing of Dresden, dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and (I would add) Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in World War II – which certainly raise more morally problematic issues than what the Bush Administration pursued.

There are of course serious-minded critics of enhanced interrogation techniques. But to pretend, as some critics do, that the morality of this issue is self-evident and that waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques are obviously unacceptable and something for which our nation should be ashamed is, in my judgment, not only wrong but irresponsible. When a nation is engaged in war, you hope to find in government sober people who are able to weigh competing moral goods and who take seriously their obligation to protect our nation. They may not get everything right at the time – hardly anyone does in the heat of the moment – but they should not have to face a lynch mob years after the fact (especially those in the lynch mob who blessed the activities at the time they were being used). The American public, one hopes, can see through all this. And as Nancy Pelosi might well discover, playing a role in inciting a mob can come at a cost."

-Peter Wehner

-T

Stem cells go beyond science

Not many of us would want the federal government to leave military procurement to defense contractors, Medicare reimbursement to doctors or banking regulation to Citigroup. But President Obama says when it comes to allocating federal funds for scientific studies, we should defer to scientists.

That assertion came in reference to research on the use of embryonic stem cells to find treatments for various diseases. Obama announced that he was junking President Bush's rules, which limited federal funding to research using embryonic stem cell lines that existed before August 2001.

"This order," said the president, "is an important step in advancing the cause of science in America" and "protecting free and open inquiry." Harold Varmus, co-chairman of the president's scientific advisory council, said it showed the president would rely on "sound scientific practice... instead of dogma in developing federal policy."

But one person's dogma is another one's ethical imperative or moral principle. Science can tell us how to build a nuclear weapon. But science can't tell us whether we should use it.

Research on embryonic stem cells is controversial because it requires the destruction of live human embryos. Supporters find it easy to minimize the significance of this fact because the embryos are only a few days old - nothing more than "blastocysts."

You don't have to be part of the pro-life movement to have qualms about this kind of scientific inquiry. James Thomson, the Universit of Wisconsin biologist who pioneered the field, has said, "If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough."

In 2001, supporters of embryonic stem cell research called on Bush to allow experiments using "surplus" frozen embryos in fertility clinics, arguing that they would be disposed of anyway. But Obama didn't limit his new policy to these fertilized eggs.

On the contrary, he left open the possiblity of funding studies using embryos created specifically so their cells can be harvested - which Congress has barred, but which some advocated would like to allow. The president took no position on whether scientists should be permitted to create embryos for the sole purpose of dismembering them for their stem cells.

He did, however, reject another option. "We will ensure," he said, "that our government never opens the door to use the cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong and has no place in our society, or any society."

Is that a scientific judgment?

No, it's a philosophical one, reflecting Obama's moral values. Apparently, the folks in white lab coats can't be relied on to answer all questions.

What this mandate means is simple: it may be permissible for scientists to create cloned embryos and kill them. It's not permissible to create cloned embryos and let them live. Their cells may be used for our benefit, but not for their own.

There lies the reality of embryonic stem cell research: It turns incipient human beings into commodities to be exploited for the sake of people who are safely past that defenseless stage of their lives.

It's a change that poses risks not just to days-old human embryos. The rest of us may one day reap important medical benefits from this research. But we may lose something more vital.



-WSJ

That which we call a rose...

By any other name would smell as sweet

The Gay Marriage Fantasy



Also, as has been previously discussed about the implications regarding religious liberties, this is also good.

Future of Religious Liberty

To quote UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh

"It seems to me plausible that judicial decisions banning opposite-sex-only marriage rules would likewise come to be extended -- by legislatures or by courts -- to go beyond their literal boundaries and instead to justify bans on private discrimination,"

"It seems quite likely that they will spill over into diminishing any constitutional claims to engage in such discrimination by private entities, including Boy-Scout-like organizations, churches, religious universities and other institutions."

He also said these claims are not "scaremongering".


Eventually churches will not be allowed to say that something like homosexuality is wrong... thus destroying the very thing gay-marriage proponents are attempting to protect - the separation of church and state.


Funny how that works...




Talk amongst yourselves.



-T