The American Prospect

Remember those bumper stickers during the early-1990s fight over the Clinton health plan? "National Health Care? The Compassion of the IRS! The Efficiency of the Post Office! All at Pentagon Prices!" In American policy debates, it's a fixed article of faith that the federal government is woefully bumbling and expensive in comparison with the well-oiled efficiency of the private sector. Former Congressman Dick Armey even elevated this skepticism into a pithy maxim: "The market is rational; government is dumb."

Ever since it debuted at a conference of environmental funders in Hawaii shortly before the election, a report titled "The Death of Environmentalism" has been infuriating the legions of nonprofit professionals who make their living in the "green" world. And it is easy to see why.

M. Michael Wolfe, a gastroenterologist at Boston University, admits he was duped by the Pharmacia Corporation, the manufacturer of the blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex. (In 2003, the company was purchased by Pfizer.) In the summer of 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association asked Wolfe to write a review of a study showing that Celebrex was associated with lower rates of stomach and intestinal ulcers and other complications than two older arthritis medications, diclofenac and ibuprofen.

What's the matter with Massachusetts? The Democrats are far too dependent on it. Go Midwest, young man.

Tort reformers complain about "frivolous" lawsuits. But at a time when government has stopped protecting citizens, trial lawyers have become the regulators of last resort.

Across the political spectrum, alarm bells are ringing about Medicare, America's giant health program for the aged and disabled. To conservatives, Medicare is a huge, Kremlin-esque bureaucracy destined to soak up more and more of the American economy. To critics on the left, it's an inadequate program that nonetheless siphons off increasingly limited funds that could be used to broaden coverage for children and working families.

The White House

The recent history of American politics can be told as the story of two alliances -- one made and unmade by the Democrats, one made and kept by the Republicans. The Democrats' alliance was with socialism, or at least social democracy. The Republicans' alliance was with conservative religion. In the last decade, the Democrats, out of necessity, broke their left-economic alliance and benefited at the ballot box; at the same time, the Republicans seem to have cemented their right-religion alliance, even as the cost-benefit ratio from that alliance sinks into the negative zone.

When Robert Mao describes the fantastic manufacturing opportunities his company sees in China, he speaks with mixed feelings. "For the first time in the modern era," he marvels, "we have an inexhaustible reservoir of good, trainable labor." But Mao, who as president and CEO of Nortel Networks China has worked in the region for 20 years, also worries about what that means for China's neighbors. For the foreseeable future, he says, almost all new investment by Nortel suppliers will go to China and not to other Asian countries.

Paul Veryser's steel-parts company, Stampings Inc., is in big trouble. Tariffs on steel imports, imposed by President George W. Bush in March, have pushed the cost of steel up by more than half on the American spot market, and this has added a whopping 25 percent to the cost of the air-bag, seat-belt and steering-wheel assembly parts his company makes.

Frank Hardin may finally get his chance to dig up the 18 million tons of gravel beneath his land in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. For nearly a decade, Oregon's Jackson County has denied him mining permits in order to keep scores of double-length mining trucks from rumbling through the tiny town of Jacksonville each day. The first town in the United States to be designated a national historic landmark, Jacksonville has more than 80 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.