Accusing a political opponent of being anti-science has become a standard tactic of both parties in recent years. These accusations are usually dishonest, as what the accuser typically means is that the accused is not properly weighing the costs and benefits of addressing a particular issue to their liking. Or they accuse them of disagreeing with a particular scientific finding. But science is a process, not a conclusion.
One is only anti-science if one is against the scientific process, which is based on falsifiable hypotheses and repeatable experiments. With this understanding, it is government itself which is anti-science. At least, that is the central point of this humorous take on the subject:
…[D]espite the obvious importance of science, one group of people does everything in pure defiance of scientific methods: politicians.
What do politicians do when they think they have a great idea? They just go and implement it. It’s like someone thinking he’s got a cure for cancer and immediately injecting it into everyone he can. That’s a madman, not a scientist.
…So we have to just observe the effects of the politicians’ policies — but that’s not so simple. Many say the Obama stimulus was a failure; others say we’d be even worse off without it. With the data we have, we can’t prove who’s right.
In science, when testing things on people, you always use a control group. If you have a drug you think will cut cholesterol, you give it to one set of test subjects. If everyone in the group that took the drug turns purple and starts choking but the control group is fine, we scientifically conclude there’s a problem with the drug.
We have an economy that’s turning purple and choking. Did the stimulus cause that? If we had a control group that looked fine, we’d know.
So what we need to do is isolate part of the country to be the control group. They’ll be free from new taxes, won’t take part in government programs and regulations and can have all the guns they want. In the rest of America, politicians can go crazy with every Keynesian idea, ban trans fats and salt and just generally control everything. Then we can compare the results of the two groups and finally have a scientific answer on what works.
What the author is describing is essentially federalism, once the understood system of government in the U.S. In a federalist system, sovereignty is shared between different levels of government, with any given sphere assigned to the lowest level capable of addressing it (you can’t leave national defense to municipalities, for instance). In this way, the states served as “laboratories of democracy.”
Sadly, this is no longer done. The federal government has gotten so big that it now routinely asserts jurisdiction over every issue, forcing only one policy throughout the nation. This denies the opportunity to try different policies and compare results.
While it has been considerably undermined, federalism is not entirely absent. States still set different policies, and results can be compared in certain limited cases. Outcomes can also be compared at a global level. For instance, this video demonstrates that the international empirical evidence shows that big government negatively impacts economic growth.
And this video explains how we can use the laboratories of democracy to devise better solutions to the growing Medicaid problem.
And finally, a similar concept to federalism is tax competition, wherein states use their policy choices to try and attract taxpayers, investment and business. Competition in this manner encourages good government, protects taxpayers, promotes pro-growth tax and economic policy, and ultimately demonstrates the practice of real science in government.
