I am among the countless readers enjoying this heavyweight clash – probably more than they are. It’s a topic that is very hard to divine consistent principles about. Perhaps they’ll allow me to stir the pot regarding something simmering beneath.

The anguish over embryonic research here seems inseparable from the question of: what sorts of things should government be subsidizing in the first place. If those things were identified and the boundaries around them honored, there would still be tough questions. For example, a war that was only arguably necessary and opposed by a sizable percentage of the citizenry would still prompt a debate of this kind – after all, no one can really argue that national defense is not something the public has to pay for, so every time you used military force you’d be spending public money on something at least some people believed was immoral. But debates of this kind would be far fewer and further between.

That is, in a better system, government would strictly limit itself to the licit-illicit debate – should something be permitted or not? There would still be some bitter controversies stemming from this. Whatever way the licit-illicit question was resolved, sizable minorities will hold passionate views about things like abortion, embryonic research, euthanasia, etc. But the society would be a far healthier one because government would not take the next step of underwriting the winners with the losers’ money – unnecessarily and continuously antagonizing tens of millions of people.

Like Ramesh, I’ve had experiences similar to the ones John talks about with friends who believe in their bones that stem cell research may cure diseases that plague their children. It is wrenching to discuss this issue with them. How many of these arguments that so deeply divide us are caused by the fact that government is now – seemingly irretrievably – in the business of picking winners and losers in the market for research dollars?

How much better off would we be as a society if we limited the role of government to enforcing the laws we pass, taxing and spending only for what was necessary (which would still unavoidably entangle government to some extent in medical research, since some of it is essential to national defense), but otherwise letting the market determine the capital arrangements around these controversial subjects. I mean, if embryonic stem-cell research is both legal and as promising as proponents claim, would the dollars not be there for the research if government funds were out of bounds? And if it were the market rather than the government which determined whether a dollar was better spent on embryonic research than on AIDS or ethanol or cultural awareness, wouldn’t our politics be better?