In moving to disband his predecessor George W. Bush’s Council of Bioethics, President Barack Obama has taken another step towards moral deregulation of the biological research industry.

That Obama plans to move in this direction was already made clear when he repealed Bush’s ban on the federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research that involves destruction of human lives in their earliest stages. 

Here’s part of what Obama said in the March 9 executive order repealing Bush’s ban: “Advances over the past decade in this promising scientific field have been encouraging, leading to broad agreement in the scientific community that the research should be supported by federal funds.”

Let’s leave aside the highly debatable claim that embryonic stem-cell research has yielded “encouraging advances,” other than to note that it’s adult stem-cell research that is delivering a constant stream of therapeutic breakthroughs, not life-destroying embryonic research.

Let’s concentrate instead on the fact that Obama appears to be arguing that controversial, morally problematic research should proceed because of the existence of “broad agreement in the scientific community that the research should be supported by federal funds.”

Hmmm … Wasn’t there a similar “broad agreement” in Wall Street’s financial community that they should be given free rein by Washington to trade in derivatives of mortgage loans that had been made to people whose ability to repay those mortgages was highly questionable?

And didn’t the Bush administration’s readiness to buy into the financial community’s argument that it should be allowed to regulate itself when it came to this kind of trading contribute mightily to last fall’s global financial meltdown — and to the ongoing economic crisis that was triggered by the meltdown?

This devastating economic precedent is worth considering as Obama implements his vision of moral self-regulation, when it comes to the federal funding of scientists who engage in ethically problematic medical research.

The lesson to be learned: Just because the beneficiaries of a given federal policy support that policy doesn’t mean it’s a good policy. Sometimes, in fact, the policy turns out to be an utter disaster.