Nowadays every frontier of human achievement faces a regulatory barrier that must be crossed. Those regulatory barriers are often prompted by interest group fears based more in political theory than reality. In particular, biotechnology is one of the more contested and feared additions to man's arsenal of control over his environment.
Former National Football League star Walter Payton has been stricken by a rare liver disease and needs a transplant in order to live. Unfortunately, the demand for available organs far outstrips the supply, and several thousand Americans this year will die waiting for those life-saving organs.
If there were justice in the world, Joan Claybrook, the head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration during the Carter administration, would be handcuffed to the steering column of a Volkswagen Beetle while an air bag was repeatedly blown up in her face. While in the government Claybrook forced on us the mandatory air bag rule. Then years later, after dozens of children were killed by air bags, she lied about her role in making them mandatory, as attorney Sam Kazman recently proved in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
The policy agenda of the Clinton administration is usually described as halting, pragmatic, and poll driven. But in its approach to the issue of medical insurance and the drive to socialize medical care, it has been systematic, principled, and highly strategic. The Clinton government is using the failures and internal contradictions of the welfare state to pursue a program of universal entitlements.
Having failed to nationalize health care at the beginning of its first term, the Clinton administration seeks to nationalize children in its second. With little opposition from Republicans, the administration has proposed spending tens of billions of dollars on subsidized day care, mostly through federal grants to state day-care bureaucracies.
