Business vs. BS

Check out this article by Eleanor Clift. As I predicted, business conservatives - people whose main value is economic growth and efficiency - are starting to fight against social conservatives - people whose main value is a Christian concept of virtue.

For businesspeople, biotechnology is just a business - a way to provide people with the goods and services they want, and make money in the process. For "business conservatives," increasing the wealth of the nation is Job #1, and business - with as few restrictions as possible - is the best way to do that. Stem cell research, if unrestricted, will make a whole heaping load of money, and improve the quality of life of a lot of people by providing them with access to medical products that cure their diseases and allow them to live healthy, normal, dignified lives. So for business conservatives, the issue is clear and unambiguous.

Social conservatives, however, take a different view. For reasons unknown, they believe that a skin cell spliced with an egg cell (the kind of thing involved in stem cell research) is an "embryo," even though it could never possibly grow into a human being under any circumstance. This allows these "social conservatives" to tap into antiabortion sentiment to support bans on biotech.

Are these social conservatives just off their nut, or what? Something tells me that this fight isn't just about stem cells. What we're seeing here is one battle in a larger war that "social conservatives" have been waging against science and technological progress for decades. Basically, as outlined in the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document," one major goal of Christian conservative groups is to replace materialism (read: technology) with a society centered around religion. They don't care if stem cell research is really killing embryos; it's just another excuse to try to paint technology as evil. If they stall the U.S. economy and put thousands of people out of jobs, so be it; if you're going to make an omlette...

So how can liberals fight this? By supporting the free market. Smokestack America is dying, and it isn't going to come back. Our nation is no longer a simple battle between the little guy and the excesses of Big Business. As often as not, the businesspeople being hurt by "social conservative" policies are our friends and relatives, small entrepreneurs trying to advance the nation's technology. If liberals can free our collective minds from the idea that free markets are dangerous, we can bring "business conservatives" into our fold and protect our free country from theocracy.