As a libertarian, I’m obviously against government programs like NIH. Most of the reasons are theoretical, perhaps principled. But, from the practicality perspective, most liberals who support these sort of “public good” programs don’t account for opportunity costs or the idea that public institutions have few feedback mechanisms to judge whether their efforts meaningfully address the intended problems.
Even so, I can’t help but sympathize with the left’s hysteria every time a Republican administration sets their political appointees loose in the bureaucracy. The amount of tax dollars being spent doesn’t change, but the GOP often injects ideological or corporate interests into programs, which impede even upon what little good the programs might accomplish.
I have a suggestion for the left: take your public interest institutions out of the hands of the GOP. There’s no reason why the employees of NIH couldn’t form a non-profit, private research institution which receives public funding from sympathetic states, municipalities and other institutions. Municipalities, states, and universities all receive federal funding. They could even divert some of these funds to their private NIH.
This isn’t the pure libertarian solution, but it sure represents the principle of voluntary public cooperation better than the “federal central health institute”. The left ought to be not only sympathetic to this attitude, really they should be at the leading edge of it. Instead, they’re sucked into the seductive idolatry of the “permanent majority” and the soft-Alinskyite strategy of using the federal bureaucracy to neuter GOP voters electorally by sabotaging them economically and culturally.
