If the commission wants a more positive note the next time it meets, it should take a look at the $1 trillion opportunity that resides in comprehensive bureaucratic reform. Not only is the rate of return high, the reforms are well within reach and long overdue.

“We call it the first synthetic cell,” said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. “These are very much real cells.”

Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie of genetically engineered plants and animals. But the ability to craft an entire organism offers a new power over life, they said.

The health-reform law caps how much insurers can spend on expenses and take for profits. Starting next year, health plans will have a regulated “floor” on their medical-loss ratios, which is the amount of revenue they spend on medical claims.

Sarbox, the Beltway’s previous attempt at financial-regulatory reform, was intended to improve the information investors receive about public companies. The law did nothing to prevent poor disclosure at companies like Lehman Brothers but it did saddle the U.S. economy with billions in unexpected costs. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission, a Sarbox cheerleader, found in a 2009 survey that the average public company pays more than $2 million per year complying with the law’s Section 404. The indirect costs may be much greater, as initial public offerings of U.S. companies have never returned to pre-Sarbox levels.

To listen to President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrats have crafted a sidewinder of a bill. It’s so tough, explains the president, that Republicans now must protect their wealthy Wall Street “movers and shakers” by trying to sabotage it. The industry is so worried, he claims, that their lobbyists are engaged in a “furious effort” to kill the legislation. If you buy this, the majority also has a synthetic collateralized debt obligation to sell you.

Here’s an alternate narrative: Democrats did spend the past year threatening to unleash hell and all its furies on the financial sector, and in response a petrified Wall Street rushed to buy protection with millions of dollars in Democratic campaign tithes. The party in power then produced legislation that—while bad in many, many ways—is something the biggest players can live with. When Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein last week told Congress he was “generally supportive” of the Democratic bill, he meant it.

If I agree to sell you a product next month through a clearinghouse, I’ll deliver the product to the clearinghouse and you’ll deliver the cash to the clearinghouse on the due date. Let’s say we both have many trades going through the clearinghouse and we’ve posted collateral to cover any single trade that fails. This is more efficient than each of us posting collateral privately for each trade. Moreover, we’re not worried that I won’t deliver or you won’t pay because we both count on the clearinghouse to deliver and pay up if one of us doesn’t.

We cannot reform these government-sponsored enterprises unless we fully confront the extent to which their outrageous behavior and reckless business practices have affected the entire commercial banking sector and the U.S. economy as a whole.

The latest liberal meme is to equate skepticism of the Obama administration with a tendency toward violence. That takes me back 15 years ago to the time President Bill Clinton accused “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves (i.e., radio talk-show hosts like me) of having incited Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. What self-serving nonsense. Liberals are perfectly comfortable with antigovernment protest when they’re not in power.

From the halls of the Ivy League to the halls of Congress, from the antiwar protests during the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq to the anticapitalist protests during International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, we’re used to seeing leftist malcontents take to the streets. Sometimes they’re violent, breaking shop windows with bricks and throwing rocks at police. Sometimes there are arrests. Not all leftists are violent, of course. But most are angry. It’s in their DNA. They view the culture as corrupt and capitalism as unjust.

The objective is a good one. Unfortunately, the 1,408-page bill includes numerous provisions that would hurt—not help—consumers and the economy. It would even make another financial crisis or bailout more likely to occur.

In an unusual White House attack on state legislation, President Barack Obama harshly criticized an Arizona measure to crack down on illegal immigration and made clear Friday that he is looking for an election-year fight over the volatile issue.

Hours later, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the nation’s toughest immigration law, making illegal immigration a state crime and requiring police to question people about their immigration status if officers suspect they are in the U.S. illegally.

Ms. Brewer, a Republican, said the state action was forced by Washington’s failure to secure the U.S. borders and solve the nation’s thorny illegal immigration problem. “Decades of inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation,” she said.