From National Review editor Rich Lowry’s column for King Features Syndicate:

As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama’s poll numbers return to Earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new program…

Obama cultivated an image of cool during the campaign. Unrattled. Deliberate. Cerebral to a fault. Who knew he’d be in a panic to remake one-sixth of the economy by the first week of August of his first year in office?

Normally, the larger and more complicated a bill is, the longer Congress takes to consider it. With the stimulus and cap-and-trade, Obama and the Democrats upended this rule of thumb by passing byzantine, 1,000-page bills that no one had the time to read. When the work product is indefensible, deliberation is dangerous.

There’s a touch of the guilty conscience about Obama’s terrible rush. As if he knows he was elected as a moderate-sounding deficit hawk last year, and if he’s going to pass an ambitious left-wing program, he must do it before the opposition builds.

I’ve already started receiving e‑mails in response to my earlier blog challenge: name a field that has suffered a productivity collapse like education (stagnating or declining performance with massive increase in cost). The leader so far: live theater.

Except it just doesn’t measure up. The NYT reported in 1968 the advent of $15 Broadway tickets. That’s equivalent to $93 today. But you can go see revivals of Chicago for as little as $63 and Hair for as little $35. Mama Mia starts at $60. Those are the three most popular plays on Broadway. You can pay more for the best seats, but you can get a good seat for the same or less money than was the case 40 years ago.

So while there has not been a dramatic improvement in the productivity of live theater, there is also no obvious decline.

What’s more, the analogy is not entirely apt. The market for live theater, such as it exists, is a market for a very specific service: people on stage in front of you acting out some bit of dramatic entertainment. The market for education is not, at least in principle, so closely bound to a particular delivery mechanism. Parents want their children prepared for good, happy and successful lives, but if they had a diverse range of options available to them that would secure those ends (as they would if education weren’t a government monopoly), they would not necessarily insist that it be delivered in exactly the same way that it was 100 years ago — a full day of kids sitting in rooms with their age-mates listening to teachers lecture.

Any other candidates for fields suffering calamitous productivity declines like education?

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb is particularly set off by the fact that the Senate has declined to continue funding the F‑22 program for which SecDef Gates and President Obama requested no more funds. He laments that Obama and Gates are representing their decision to expand the Army by 22,000 soldiers as being paid for by cuts in the F‑22 budget. Goldfarb remarks that this leaves us in a situation where

We may have more troops to patrol Afghanistan, but they’ll be patrolling on bicycles — because it’s a zero-sum game.

Is it impolitic to observe that “The F‑22 has never been flown over Iraq or Afghanistan”?

Moreover, it’s my understanding that the Weekly Standard folks, Goldfarb included, believe in the importance of fighting a series of labor-intensive counterinsurgency wars across the Islamic world. Based on Goldfarb’s remarks, he does not wish to support this objective by making cuts in capital to fund more labor. What would be good to know, then, just to set up the debate, is how much he thinks we ought to be spending on defense. We spend roughly (depending on how you count and whether you include the two wars we’re fighting) the same as the entire rest of the world combined. Based on my consumption of the Weekly Standard’s foreign-policy output over the past several years, you could easily convince me that the between $600,000,000,000 and $800,000,000,000 American taxpayers spend each year on defense is insufficient to support the Weekly Standard’s foreign-policy aims. But if there should not be a tradeoff like the one Gates pointed to in this discussion, how much is enough? Inquiring minds want to know.

A couple weeks ago, my Cato colleague, Justin Logan, wrote a post on Rory Stewart’s brilliant article that appeared in the London Review of Books. Justin offered compelling reasons why arguments for nation building, and the concomitant “state failure is a threat to humanity,” are deeply flawed. But I think Stewart’s piece offers arguments that bears emphasis.

Stewart is Chief Executive of The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization based in Kabul. According to Stewart, many policymakers and prominent opinion leaders are prone to:

minimizing differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandizing our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals… [these irresistible illusions] papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy… It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable.

Perhaps Stewart’s most important point:

But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

The argument that America’s security depends on rebuilding failed states, like Afghanistan, fails partly since terrorists can move to governed spaces. Rather than setting up in weak, ungoverned states, enemies can flourish in strong states because these countries have formally recognized governments with the sovereignty to reject interference in their internal affairs.

Insurgents know they can’t fight a conventional army directly. With a protracted war of attrition, however, they can gradually expand their political and economic influence.

Thus, as we’ve seen in Vietnam, Iraq, and today in Afghanistan, insurgents leave areas where American troops concentrate and then return when those troops deploy elsewhere. And Afghan militants find sanctuary in neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan, which is not targeting the original Afghan Taliban.

In fact, Islamabad still supports the original Afghan Taliban that at one time controlled most of Afghanistan. The Swat valley offensives we keep hearing about feature the Pakistanis fighting indigenous Pakistani Taliban groups that have proliferated in response to Islamabad’s alignment with the United States in the so-called “war on terror.”

Honestly, America has no business stopping Pakistan from influencing Afghanistan. Let them have it! As I argue here, “the war’s strategic rationale still remains tenuous. Central Asia holds little intrinsic strategic value to the United States, and America’s security will not necessarily be endangered even if an oppressive regime takes over a contiguous fraction of Afghan territory.”

Sadly, however, bureaucratic inertia and misconceptions of Washington’s moral obligations could trap the United States in Afghanistan for decades. Hopefully, some people in the Obama White House will inform the president that Afghanistan is not a winnable war.

Here is the message members of Congress should send to Ben Bernanke during the Fed chief’s annual Capitol Hill testimony this week: He is fighting for his job. With his term up in January of next year, Bernanke needs to be called to account for the Fed’s many questionable actions during the financial turmoil of the past year.

Even while correctly identifying the “global savings glut,” Bernanke sat by and did nothing about the unsustainable build-up of leverage in the housing market—the “bubble” which famously burst in late 2008. Bernanke also used Fed financing to bail out Bear Stearns and AIG—hotly political moves which should rightfully have been left to Congress—and oversaw the massive expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet from about $900 billion to over $2 trillion. Under Bernanke, the Fed has transcended monetary policy and bank supervision into the world of fiscal policy.

While thus politicizing the Fed on one hand, Bernanke has sought to insulate the bank from congressional pressures by appeasing majority Democrats with various new credit regulations. Both the recently proposed credit card and mortgage rules unnecessarily restrict credit and increase the litigation risk facing banks, while doing nothing to roll back some of the irresponsible lending policies that exacerbated the housing bubble.

Bernanke’s pandering to the Left on misguided “consumer protections,” and the absence of any debate over the Fed’s role in the housing bubble, raise serious questions as to whether Bernanke understands the causes of the current financial crisis. We cannot hope to avoid the next financial crisis without a Fed chairman who understands the current one.

Speaking of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Leslie Harris gave a terrific quote to Forbes​.com for an article on cybersecurity:

The Rockefeller-Snowe Bill represents just the sort of heavy-handed regulation that could stifle innovation and hurt the economy, argues Leslie Harris, president and chief executive of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “If you lock things down too tight and try to centralize and federalize all kinds of standards, you’re on a collision course with the innovators who may be making the next great tech product in their backyard,” she says.

The question is why CDT doesn’t apply this thinking to the field of identification and credentialing.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has produced a very thorough analysis of the PASS ID Act, which would revive the REAL ID national ID program.

The EPIC analysis states flatly, “The bill would establish a national ID card,” and, “The intent of this legislation is to facilitate a National ID system.”

That’s quite a contrast to Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy and Technology, who alone believes that PASS ID “prevents the creation of a National ID system.”