The FDA has determined that milk and meat from some cloned animals (cattle, swine, and goats) is safe to eat. It has therefore lifted a moratorium on such products. But don’t expect to see milk and meat from cloned animals in your local grocery store. Cloning is incredibly expensive, so cloned animals would almost certainly never be slaughtered or used for milking. Instead, they’d be used for breeding. The idea is that we’d use cloning to create exact reproductions of animals with superior qualities, and we’d then breed those cloned specimens to generate superior offspring.

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Classical liberals have long derided their conservative cousins for being fairweather friends of small government, but the criticism has been fairly limited. In general, conservatives have embraced limited government on matters of economic regulation and have endorsed governmental meddling only on matters involving so-called “values” issues like broadcast decency and homosexuality. Lately, though, conservatives seem ever more willing to embrace big government on matters that seem more economic than values-oriented.

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Frank Pasquale at Madisonian is concerned that organ markets do not show enough concern for the poor. He writes…

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My friend Seth Weinberger over at Security Dilemmas has a great post on why the left is actually to blame for the post-9/11 national security apparatus it (and many others) hates so much. Basically, it comes down to “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  When bigger government is your answer to every problem, don’t be too surprised when big government tries to actually solve every problem.

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Economist Michael Salinger, Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics for the past year, comments on the recent FTC Report and price gouging in Sunday’s WSJ (HT: Greg Mankiw). I have blogged a bit about the FTC Report previously: once about its findings (that “market manipulation” did not explain post-Katrina price increases), once about media reactions to the Report, and again criticizing the ill-advised proposed federal price gouging legislation.

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Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a fractured decision in consolidated appeals raising the issue of which wetlands come within the ambit of the federal Clean Water Act (CWA). The wetlands at issue were next to drainage ditches that, when full of water, would eventually flow into navigable waters. The record did not establish whether the connections between the wetlands and the drainage ditches were continuous or intermittent, or whether the ditches contained continuous or merely occasional flows of water.

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AEI is hosting an event focusing on the problems of the nation’s shortage of vital organs. The website has links to the papers. The event agenda includes my friend and colleague Lloyd Cohen, who has done a good deal of work in this area (including this).

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Via Ted Frank at Point of Law, the House has overwhelmingly passed a price gouging bill that will not help consumers, but on the bright side, is likely to provide a fresh example for microeconomics instructors teaching the consequences of price controls. The award for economic illiteracy of the week goes to the whole House, but special mention should be made for Joe Barton, Head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to whom the WSJ attributes the following words…

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