Reynolds: Washington Isn't Working

"There are two Americas, all right," writes Glenn Reynolds in USA Today. "One America can launch rockets. The other America can't even launch a website."

There are two Americas, all right. There's one that works -- where new and creative things happen, where mistakes are corrected, and where excellence is rewarded. Then there's Washington, where everything is pretty much the opposite. That has been particularly evident over the past week or so. One America can launch rockets. The other America can't even launch a website.

In Washington, it's been stalemate, impasse, and theater -- the kind of place where a government shutdown leads park rangers to complain, "We've been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It's disgusting." Well, yes. The politics don't work, the websites don't work -- even for the people who manage to log on -- and the government shutdown informs us that most of government is "non-essential." Instead of correcting mistakes or rewarding excellence, it's mostly finger-pointing, blame-shifting, and excuse-making.

Meanwhile, in the other America -- the one where people have their own money and ideas invested, and where they get the credit for their successes and pay the price for their failures -- things are going a lot better. Just a couple of examples:

Read his column.

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.