Henninger: Big Government Implodes

"Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded," writes Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal.  That's the day a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy quietly announced that the "complexity of [Obamacare] requirements" required delaying implementation of the employer mandates for a year. Two days later, the Obama administration announced "that because of 'operational barriers' to IRS oversight, individuals would be allowed to self-report their income to qualify for the law's subsidies."

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law's theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.

He notes that "ObamaCare's failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up."

• The NSA data collection has people upset, even frightened that someone like Snowden can pull data onto a thumb drive and walk with it;
• Responding to the IRS political abuse scandal, the agency managers' defense was that the IRS is too big for anyone to know what its agents are doing;
• The nation's deteriorating weather satellites will wear out before being replaced, so government is looking at a possible 17-month gap in the availability of crucial weather data;
• The State Department failed to understand the Arab Spring despite warnings.

Concludes Henniger:

Those indispensable but dying weather satellites are a metaphor for the U.S. now. Whether ObamaCare or the border fence, Washington is winding down into a black hole of its own making. The debate's over. Liberalism will be swept into this vortex, too.

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UPDATE:  Washington Examiner editors take Henninger's point further in Obamacare: A 19th Century Answer to a 21st Century Question:

Simply put, the digitization of social interaction, economic transaction, the political process and everything in between is decentralizing the world, moving it in the opposite direction of the massive centralization of Obamacare. But nobody needs a federal bureaucrat to tell him what health insurance to buy when anybody with an Internet connection can simultaneously solicit bids from thousands of competing providers, pay the winner via electronic fund transfers, manage the claims process with a laptop, consult with physicians and other medical specialists via email, and even be operated on remotely by surgeons on the other side of the globe.

Rather than imposing a top-down, command-economy, welfare-state health care model with roots in Otto von Bismarck's Germany of 1881, a 21st-century government would ask what is needed to apply to health care access the Internet's boundless capacity to empower individual choice.

Slapping the 'Bitter Clinger' Label on Liberals

"Mr. Obama's remark about rural Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion is the coin of the realm in his crowd," writes Daniel Henninger in the WSJ.

But let's put their shared consensus another way: Somehow it became a conventional view in contemporary American politics that it is non-urban conservatives who in every case have to accommodate their beliefs to a national culture created by people who live somewhere else. "They" must adjust on abortion, guns, school prayer, sexual mores and all the rest of it. Liberals, meanwhile, not only feel no need to concede anything but use the commanding heights of the press and academia to define anyone who dissents from their ever-evolving national culture as a political fringe obsessed with people, one might say, who aren't like them.

Get the Economic Growth Choice Right

"Get the growth choice right, and we'll be ok," argues Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal. "Get it wrong and your kids will be talking Australia emigration."

Right now, with growth stuck below 2%, we're toast. With strong growth at 3% or better, there will be jobs. With long-term growth, Medicare, debt and the rest of the horribles that keep worrywarts awake at night are solvable. With strong growth, the U.S. will not have to cede world leadership prematurely to whichever Chinese functionary slugs his way to the top of their heap. With strong growth, your college graduate can move out of the house. With normal American growth, Europe may be irrelevant but it won't die, and a U.S. president won't look oddly small talking to the Vladimir Putins of the world.

Mr. Obama was exactly right in Cleveland when he said economic growth "is the defining issue of our time," that his and his opponents' views on growth are fundamentally different and "this election is your chance to break that stalemate." This he gets. Only the most obtuse "pragmatists" persist in believing the solution lies in a mystical center somehow combining elements from this ideological oil and water. ... Voters have to pick [between] two competing growth models, which means paying attention to what the candidates are saying about economic growth.