Larry Lindsey, with his profound knowledge of Washington ways, has absolutely nailed the principal guiding motto of all regulatory bureaucracies: "Cross us and we will make you pay."

The Cold War is an increasingly distant memory in American military minds, except in the minds of the arms control community, and in particular those who seek the elimination of nuclear weapons. Alas, our president is a member in good standing of this community—indeed, an organizer.So, too, it...

The Dodd-Frank Act in general, and in particular its favorite child, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, represent sharp political disputes, as now with bypassing the Senate by the "recess" appointment of its director. But more fundamentally, they represent clashing political philosophies.

If there is one success story since 9/11, it has been the efforts to combat terror finance. If military action is sometimes akin to conducting surgery with an axe, efforts to dry up sources of funding are like wielding a scalpel.

Indiana governor Mitch Daniels has brought a corporate mentality to the job of streamlining state bureaucracies.

For decades, the challenges of school reform in cities like Dallas seemed nearly insuperable. Even as they spent as much or more than nearby suburbs, city schools struggled under the weight of poverty, broken families, turgid bureaucracies, depressing conditions, and low expectations. The result has been dismal performance.

In The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future (Basic Books, June 2010), Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, outlines a new culture war over two competing visions of America. In one, America continues as...

The real name of the Dodd-Frank Act should be the "Faith in Bureaucracy Act." This is a faith I do not share. I see no evidence that the human minds operating in regulatory bureaucracies, and driven to political defense and expansion of their own jurisdiction and power, have any superior insight into the unknowable future and its ineradicable uncertainty.