Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove says the Republicans are “winning the health care debate” and that “passing health-care reform could be harmful to the health of congressional Democrats.”

This, of course, is beside the point. If enacted, a massive expansion of government into the health care industry is unlikely to be reversed even if the GOP wins control of the Congress as a result in 2010 or 2012. With this new health care entitlement in place, the Republicans would be relegated even in victory to a role like that of the Tories in Britain, arguing over exactly how much taxpayer money to spend instead of whether to spend it at all. Accepting what is likely to be a permanent expansion of the size and scope of government for the sake of short-term electoral gain, as Rove does, seems like a poor trade-off for conservatives.

• Fixing ‘Too Big to Fail.’ “During the crisis it was often said that officials at the Federal Reserve and Treasury would do ‘whatever it takes’ to avoid a Great Depression. Now they must do whatever it takes to address one of the key causes of the financial crisis: the existence of financial institutions that consider themselves too big to fail – but which are run in such a way that they are bound to do so.”
• Why the Left Won’t Really Tackle Inequality.
• Crowds Are Really Individuals. “What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution.”
• John Thune: Time for a TARP Exit Strategy. “It is time to bring an end to the TARP emergency measures and come up with an exit strategy to get government out of the business of running businesses. The administration owes the American people a timeline for how it will do this.”
• Nile Gariner on the Great Irish Surrender. “The Irish ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon will pave the way for the biggest erosion of national sovereignty in Europe since the Second World War.”

You know how far ACORN’s star has fallen when the organization becomes the butt of jokes on late-night television.

• Updated Book Titles.
• Washington’s Most Expensive Bike Rack. It features all kinds of amenities and cost $4 million. And it was paid for with your tax dollars, of course.
• The Unintended Consequences of Protectionism. “Mr. Obama may not intend to start a trade war, but then Hoover didn’t set out to pick one either. His political abdication is what made it possible, however, and trade passions once unleashed can be impossible to control. On his present course, President Obama is giving the world every reason to conclude he is a protectionist.”

• Class Warfare. Responding to hard times, governments around the world decide not to tighten their belts but to increase their revenues through punitive taxes.
• Is This Really a Compromise? The Baucus proposal addresses superficial concerns but doesn’t address the principal conservative complaint about the Left’s health care plan: that it vastly increases the size and scope of the federal government.
• Norman Podhoretz on Why Jews are Liberals. “[I]n virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right.”
• Tyler Cowen on Politics and the Economy. “But we are now injecting politics ever more deeply into the American economy, whether it be in finance or in sectors like health care. Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes, but also we’re repeating them on an ever-larger scale.”