There’s a health policy joke that MIT’s Jon Gruber likes to tell: A health economist dies and goes to heaven. When he gets there, he is greeted by St. Peter and told that he can ask God one question. The economist asks, “Will there ever be universal health insurance coverage in the United States?” God replies, “Yes, but not in my lifetime.”

Across the nation, college students and faculty were recently protesting, sometimes violently, against tuition hikes by public universities. Faced with grim budget outlooks, state governments have reduced funding to higher education; the worst cuts are in California, where perpetual fiscal mismanagement has left legislators with few alternatives. As the cost of an MIT education (the sum of tuition, fees, books, room and board) crosses $50,000 next year, there may be a temptation among some MIT students to join in and stage the same sort of sit-ins and rallies that have appeared elsewhere.

On February 24th, Barack Obama appeared before the Business Roundtable, an association of corporate CEOs, to give an address on what has now become a major talking point of his administration: competitiveness. In the president’s view, the main problem facing the U.S. is that other nations are catching up, they are making investments in education and infrastructure that have been unmatched by the United States, and as a consequence, American economic well-being has been eroded. The solution, he explained, is to renew America’s competitive edge with fresh investment, health care reform, stricter financial oversight, and closer integration between business and government to promote American exports abroad. In his own words, “Winning the competition means we need to export more of our goods and services to other nations.”

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act, an insurance program designed to cover against what were then considered the greatest financial risks in American society: disability, unemployment, loss of spouse or parents, and, most notably, old age. At the time, the poverty rate among the elderly was over 50 percent — the Great Depression had wiped out the savings of many, and older citizens, whose best wage-earning years were behind them, were particularly hard hit. By funding the benefits of current retirees with income taxes on current workers, Social Security constituted a major windfall for its first generation of recipients; Ida May Fuller, the very first citizen to receive a Social Security check, paid $24.75 into the system and received back $22,888.92 over the course of her lifetime. In this manner, the program theoretically provided a way to spread out the pain of the Great Depression — each generation would pay some ever-declining amount to the previous generation until the entirety of that one monumental loss had been spread out across decades.

Before discussing banking reform, it is necessary to first understand why and how financial markets operate.

Thirteen months ago, I wrote an article for this newspaper entitled “Screw Bipartisanship,” in which I claimed there was a fundamental disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the most important problem facing health care markets. I suggested that, rather than fruitlessly try to find common ground, Democrats should ignore the Republican point of view and muscle through legislation that would mandate individual insurance coverage.

As national health care reform passes into Schrödingerian un-death (a quantum-pundit state of simultaneously being both perma-killed and on its way to certain victory), it is tempting to wallow in self-defeating cynicism and bemoan the eternal incompetence of the left wing. After their latest botching of the political process, it is clear that Democrats should be demoted from a “political party” to something a little more their league, like a “political intramural team” (with matches every other Thursday so long as Chad doesn’t screw up the scheduling again). For long-time supporters of health insurance mandates (myself included), it is difficult to summon the will to do anything but face-palm the remainder of 2010 away and wait for the inevitable Republican take-over of Congress. At least then we’ll have the opportunity to blame government gridlock on something real, like an irreconcilable partisan split between our executive and legislative branches.

In George Washington’s farewell address, the president warned of the growing influence of partisanship and the dangers of entangling alliances abroad. In Dwight Eisenhower’s goodbye, the president intoned menacingly about the creation of what he called a “military-industrial complex” and its undue influence on the American political landscape. George Bush’s farewell address was devoted to one topic — terrorism — and though the tenor was optimistic, the message was clear: Our enemies remain, and they will attack us again.

It shouldn’t be necessary at this point, but given the pockets of feigned disbelief that remain abroad, it deserves repeating: The Iranians are developing nuclear weapons. Rhetorically, they continue to maintain the pretense of pursuing peaceful nuclear power, but the structure of their program belies its true nature as a weapons development effort. Their near-exclusive focus on isotopic enrichment, their construction of clandestine facilities, and their recent decision to enrich uranium to levels higher than what is necessary for commercial power plants are all signals that should remove whatever doubt remains of Iranian intentions. What Iran has achieved to date amounts to a small but growing breakout capacity. If they continue on their current pace, by mid-2010 they will have enough low-to-medium enriched uranium to produce several atomic bombs and the centrifuge capacity to bring that material to weapons readiness within a few months.

In November 2009, hackers released of thousands of confidential e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. Although the e-mails did not reveal scientific fraud or the fabrication of scientific evidence (as recently concluded in a partial decision by an internal review board) they did suggest that researchers at the CRU had become partisan in their support of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.