On the other hand, despite having one of the most widely-read blogs in the world you'll almost never see him on TV. Both the right-wing and the left-wing sides of the media don't like to show conservatives unless they're angry and fire-breathing. And even the most intelligent of the fire-breathing conservatives (say, Krauthammer) always come off as non-thoughtful.
Please remove you head from the sand.
I'll put up Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and George Will up against whoever you want from the Left any day.
Furthermore, I submit that I think the Left often makes the error of mistaking the Right's distaste for having the "intellectual elites" run their lives for a distaste in intelligence informing their lives.
Which is more harmful?
As a scientist, the damning of stem cell research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/nyregion/09placebo.html?re...
(I'm speculating that the opposition are democrats, but in NYC it's a good guess.)
Or, to take a bipartisan example, people of pretty much any party would be opposed to repeating the Tuskegee experiment (or many others). It's not anti-scientific to oppose a particular experiment because you believe conducting it involves immoral acts. You might disagree with the morality involved, but that's not the same thing.
The question is whether or not one is using rational criteria to determine what's moral.
In much the same way, given the axiom "blacks are people too", the rational conclusion is that Tuskegee was immoral.
Fertilized eggs can divide. Is it rational to believe that a person can divide? Is each twin 50% of a person?
However the premise itself, "stem cells are people" is most certainly definitely drawn from religious faith.
The premise that black people are rather similar to white people, on the other hand, seems to draw on scientific knowledge. Obviously, there's still the step of drawing a rational, moral conclusion from that also.
Moral statement: "Creatures with X degree of similarity to white people deserve the same rights as white people."
The latter statement is simply unprovable via the scientific method. Forget even about the racism - the statement "you shouldn't rape/torture/murder people" also can't be proved via the scientific method.
But stupid or smart Keynesianism is not certainly "pro-stupidity" economics in the sense that's obvious aiming to be smart. It's endorsed by lots of apparently smart economists, it uses coherent mathematical models etc.
You might argue that the positions of Glen Beck or George Bush would be smarter to adopt than those of Lawrence Summers. Whatever. You could hardly argue that these folks took a "pro-science" approach in defending their positions.
For example, the proposition of a single-payer healthcare system essentially reduces to the question, ``should my neighbor be able to walk up to my house and demand a percentage of my income at gunpoint to pay for his healthcare expenses?''
Maybe the adoption of such a policy will deliver positive, scientifically-observable results for society-at-large, but (as far as I'm concerned) such a policy isn't moral in the first place and therefore shouldn't be adopted.
Maybe targeting only scientific validity in politics is a very misleading oversimplification.
I think that we must be careful to keep science and policy separated. Even if we are to grant that a certain point of science is correct, it does not necessarily lead to acceptance of a point of policy.
For example, it is well known that at the margin, minimum wage laws increase unemployment amongst the least skilled workers. But it doesn't automatically follow that such a policy should not be followed; perhaps with a proper safety net, those bottom-rung folks can be motivated into improving themselves. Likewise (and even more controversially), even if climate change is as serious as some claim, it does not necessarily follow that all efforts must be pursued: it may be that the cost of fixing it exceeds the cost of the expected damage.
It's just too easy to say "we have this problem, thus we must do something". The values that drive our actions are different from the science that allows us to understand the world.
The only sure consequence of imposing a minimum-wage law is that private businesses are restricted in the wages that they can offer potential employees. Is it moral that the government will arrest me if I hire a 16-year-old to run errands for me at five dollars an hour? I don't think so.
I've got an example for you: should my neighbor be able to walk up to my house and demand a percentage of my income at gunpoint to pay for his attendance at university?
And even if such a gunpoint demand is allowed, I'm curious what you would say about the morality of an unapalogetic libertarian that attends university with just such a subsidy.
... we could add that any vote against foreign aid would require congressmen to watch videos of Africans dying of starvation, any vote for defense spending should require pictures of foreigners dying horribly and any vote again it should require the viewing of a live re-enactment of the burning of Washington, any vote against cell research would require the direct viewing of people suffering from exotic, disgusting diseases, anything offending the catholics should require a harangue describing the multiple tortures involves in Hell and so-forth...
I flagged this topic but, like Dogbert said "I can dish this out all day.."