Except that instead of circuses we call them football games—a term linked indissolubly with the mess at Penn State: NCAA fines and penalties, disappearing statues of head coaches and all the rest.

"We've had enough," said Oregon State University President Ed Ray, affirming the virility of the NCAA penalty meted out to Penn State for ignoring ex-coach Jerry Sandusky's record of child abuse, a record too well known by now to warrant rehashing.

The glory and majesty of Penn State's football program had come, seemingly, to outrank common human decencies, such as justice to the victims of Sandusky's perversions. So it came to what it came to—catastrophe for Joe Paterno and Penn State football.

Paterno, who was said to read and quote the classics, doubtless knew Juvenal's famous swipe at the moral deterioration of first- and second-century Rome, evidenced by the Roman people's unprepossessing fixations. They wanted free bread and high-quality entertainment.

College football anyone? The semi-professionalization of the stadium rituals once practiced on Saturday afternoons for students and loyal alumni is among the major features of modern life. The Irish, the Tide, the Longhorns, the Nittany Lions and such like no longer pertain just, or chiefly, to the campus environment. Thanks to fat television contracts and relentless promotion by the schools themselves, college football is big-time entertainment, just one step lower than the Giants and the Packers, the Cowboys and the Steelers. Winning teams bring renown to their schools. Renown means money. Money means more money, in the form of endowments, buildings, mega-stadiums, bigger salaries and bigger contracts than ever before. Wow.

No one with head screwed firmly in place will deny that college football has for decades fostered romance of an appealing character. "Do or die for Old Siwash!" "Win one for the Gipper!" "You gotta be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls...!" Here's one for the family album: Mr. and Mrs. W. P. Murchison, having committed holy matrimony on a bright October morning in 1940, drove 100 miles in their Ford coupe to attend the Rice-Texas game. First things first.

Yes, we've all had the college football bug bite us at one time or another. There was a kind of sweetness to it years ago; a becoming naivete, belonging to the age when "coeds" wore heels to the game, and their dates donned coat and tie.

No more. Once college football turned into big business, with product tie-ins and national broadcasts, not to mention million-dollar packages for successful coaches, we got really, truly serious about winning. Joe Paterno and other winning coaches found themselves on the road to divinization—no healthy estate for mortals. Gods can do no wrong. They need merely win games. Then more games and more, until, in classical fashion, the roof crashes and the statues disappear.

Said the president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, announcing the penalties against Penn State: "Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing, and protecting young people." About which we'll have to wait and see: cognizant, perhaps, that coaches and colleges are hardly alone in demanding and rewarding victories. Would those who cut moral corners do so without public encouragement or at the very least acquiescence? What about the people noted by Juvenal—the kind who "once bestowed commands" and so on—bored, apparently, by all that and looking, for the most part, now to stuff their stomachs, eyeballs and minds?

The Rome-America comparisons, familiar for decades, can be and have been overdone. They serve a certain purpose, even so—that of inviting reflection on the consequences of slobbish, not to mention downright immoral, behavior.

Suppress your ideals, if any; put "winning" above all other goals, including the formation of student character and the transmission of ancient wisdom: You, too, can run a big-time college football program.

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And so he did it anyway, announcing last Friday the birth of a new immigration policy affecting an estimated 800,000 illegals. These illegals—according to the president, who invokes the right to "prosecutorial discretion"—get exempted from deportation for two years. The new policy renders them legally untouchable, in spite of their illegal status.

The situation moves beyond factuality. Up becomes down, hot becomes cold—by presidential directive, it is as if the country for whom the policy has been constructed was another nation entirely: less like the United States, more like the Wonderland in which Alice discovered the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and other self-definition experts.

The president gets to make up his own reality about rules and limits on power. "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'" Mr. Dumpty, meet Mr. Obama.

Not that any doubt exists as to what goes on here. An election goes on. Obama wants a bumper crop of Latino votes in Florida, Virginia, Nevada and elsewhere. He thinks he knows one way to get them: namely, get off the topic of the economy and win a reputation for decisive action, as well as compassion, in an area of policy the country, let alone Congress, still hasn't figured out how to address.

The new policy has two additional advantages: It obliges Mitt Romney, at the risk of offending voters on both sides of the immigration question, to put his own cards on the table respecting treatment of illegals.

Practically speaking, despite Republican talk of a lawsuit challenging the president's right to devise and impose his own policy on immigration, the policy Obama has enacted has only a short distance to gallop without constitutional fodder. If it lasts until Election Day, that's good enough. Let it go at that point.

It's not only possible, but it's also desirable that the president take some well-deserved raps for wiping his feet on general understandings of the limits on presidential powers. However, the number of raps he actually receives is unlikely to be large. The commentators and bloggers who drive our national conversation in the Internet era understand that this matter doesn't turn on constitutional and political science considerations, rather—as they know—it turns on political necessity.

Somewhat more to the point, it fits the modern style of discourse and action: Don't respect rules, procedures and formulas; get out in front—just do what it takes, and when critics try to pull you back, either pretend they're nuts or that you haven't heard them.

It's the age of personal expression after all—no fooling around with the unenlightened. Just do it. Which was, come to think of it, the classic expression of the 1960s ethos of protest and direct action: Don't ask questions—do it. Good old Jerry Rubin stuck the exhortation on the dust jacket of his book purporting to explain the ethic of get-out-my-way-everybody.

Rules? Laws? Constitutions? Precedents? It's just leftover garbage, all of it, from the historic tyranny of dead white male fascist pigs. The kids of the counterculture would show us what to do: namely, fight the cops; take over the dean's office; make love, not war; burn down the ROTC building; and instruct professors and parents as to their native stupidity.

The habit of defiance turns out to be fun, the way loose, rule-less ways of doing business always starts out as fun. The habit grows and spreads, of course, spoiling older notions of respect and restraint and duty. The end comes to justify the means. The culture—as a whole—sneezes, catches cold, and comes at last to redefine its motives and pastimes as personal: none of anybody else's business.

"'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master—that's all."

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There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done.

The faint breezes from the '50s and '60s rustling the page of Robert Caro's super biography of Johnson—the brand-new volume, titled The Passage of Power, is fourth and penultimate in the series—stirs memories of times when politicians sort of, a lot of the time, understood their job. They were not nearly as busy as their modern heirs. Their role in our affairs was smaller, less intrusive. That could be part of the reason that "legislative success" was not yet an oxymoron. The larger and more complex the thing you're trying to do in government, the fainter the chances of actually getting it done in a way that contributes to the general good and brings credit to the political artisans.

In our era of mega government, hardly anything goes right when lawmakers attack a problem. It was somewhat otherwise when Johnson led the Senate's Democratic majority and later, ran the White House. The new volume, which I haven't yet read, though naturally I will do so (what adventure story fan wouldn't?), is the tale of LBJ's presidential quest, the failure of that quest in 1960, the miserable years spent as vice president, and then his takeover of power upon John Kennedy's assassination. On from there, in volume 5, to the Great Society and the War in Vietnam. And then ... the end, the legacy.

There's the tricky part—the legacy. We all know Johnson's capacity to "do." What we forget, sometimes, is that there are times to do and times not to do. Don't just do something; stand there, is the right witticism for the occasion. Lyndon Johnson never got the drift. He was all about action—about getting things done and assuming that, in the process (because he was smart and had smart people working for him), they were getting done right. A lot of the time, the good of the order—the good of the nation—means doing the least you can get by with.

The comparison of Medicare—a keystone of the Johnson Great Society program—with Obamacare seems irresistible. The former started small—a hardly noticeable $7.7 billion in 1970. It grew and grew as new beneficiaries and programs were added. By the turn of the century, the program cost $224 billion. What a pittance that now seems. A recent report by Medicare's trustees shows the system becoming insolvent in 2024, with long-term debt presently calculated at $26.9 trillion. The Congress through which Lyndon Johnson cajoled and flogged the Medicare bill dwelled only sporadically, it seems, on the principle of "One Thing Leads to Another."

The last thing to which the principle led was, of course, Obamacare, the scripted takeover by government of one-sixth of the American economy. Maybe the U. S. Supreme Court will grasp the constitutional irony of allowing a government of supposedly limited powers to operate with no limits.

Thus with other elements of the Great Society, the federal takeover of public education began with passage, at Johnson's instance, of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The government's latest education gig is the quest for a set of national standards. Creation of the Job Corps, for training of unemployed workers, created no lasting new jobs but lots of new government dependents, eager for government grants to multiply.

Lyndon Johnson got things done. To a monumental extent, he got the wrong things done while borrowing heavily against the future. That he probably thought he was doing good isn't the main point. The point is an ancient one: Beware power; it corrupts, undermines liberty, and empties treasuries. Save us from dynamic politicians, as well as from egotistical by barely competent ones, is a prayer that makes sense. Maybe the dull, middling kind is the kind that best serves people who love liberty.

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I have proof. That's to say, Gingrich keeps opening his mouth. Aargghhhh. The stuff that spills out!

The terrible, horrible, no good, please-go-away race for the Republican presidential nomination has the potential to deliver President Obama the kind of ringing affirmation that seemed impossible not many months ago. That was before the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives began shrieking his dislike and contempt for, well, the candidate likeliest to deny him, Newt Gingrich. Can you imagine it for a second?—the right to make over America in his personal and intellectual image.

No one treats Newton Leroy Gingrich like that and gets away with it. No one. If Republican voters are duped somehow into misappraising his genius and they spurn his suit, Gingrich appears to have decided, perhaps after consultation with heaven, that he'll show 'em. He'll pull down the temple, Samson-like. (Newton Gingrich fancies comparison to the strong and the brave.) Beneath the Republican ruins, we'll lie and sigh while the proud van of the Obama campaign sweeps past to victory.

Gingrich as a vice presidential nominee? Why not? Who can fairly be judged at this point to have done more than Newton Gingrich to undermine the Obama resistance movement?

In a New Hampshire debate, the former speaker of the House instructs his main presidential rival, Mitt Romney, to drop the "pious baloney." Nice, high-toned language, don't you agree? Very presidential. But we have to move on quickly, to ingest the news that Newton Leroy Gingrich, with the aid of a gambling baron from Nevada, will be distributing far and wide a 28-minute documentary purporting to expose the seamy side of Mitt Romney—his heartlessness, as head of an investment firm, in trying to restore the fortunes of failed or failing companies. Romney says his stewardship created a net 100,000 jobs, notwithstanding that other jobs were eliminated in the process.

As it happens, the Romney record at Bain Capital (the firm he left in 1999) is a favorite Democratic theme. The day before the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic National Committee released a web video making essentially the same charges as Gingrich. The Democrats—with little to tout in the way of economy-reviving policies—have long promised to throw Bain's "job destruction" record in the face of a GOP ticket headed by Romney. Why wait? the ex-speaker seems to reason. Let's do it now, since nothing else seems to be helping the Gingrich campaign.

The Bain story is complex as all get-out, even for the Wall Street Journal's attempt this week, in a news story, to simplify the matter. This is all the more reason to handle the story gingerly. Ah, but "gingerly" isn't the Gingrich style. Nothing else will do for Gingrich but that Bain Capital's attempts to turn around hard-up companies represent greed and contempt for all but the wealthy. Exactly—as Romney points out—"the type of criticism we've come to expect from President Obama and his left-wing allies at Moveon.org."

Even without Newton Leroy, the GOP presidential quest, with its mostly B-list roster of candidates, would have been less than inspirational. With him, the contest turns potentially fratricidal, just when the party should be starting to consider the healing of wounds, the unification of message, the overdue observance of Ronald Reagan's once-famous 11th Commandment—to speak no ill of a fellow Republican.

Obama-Gingrich—the sound of such a political union has a rich ring, in spite of what one knows already about Barack Obama; namely, he understands the futility of joining forces with a fellow know-it-all. Newton Leroy Gingrich is anything but the easiest man in America to live with—as two ex-wives might some day be induced to explain.

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Whoever said it first spoke a mouthful: Rome wasn't built in a day. To which I would add: congressmen didn't build it either. Members of Congress bicker, bellow and throw nails under each other's pickup tires seemingly trying to block meaningful action like the enactment of legislation authorizing payment of national obligations.

The antics and head-butts that have lately enlivened life in Washington, D.C., have made most Americans, I judge, want to draw the curtains and plug an old Harry Potter flick into the DVD player. It seemed, until recently, our leaders couldn't get serious about reducing spending. They could only accuse each other of perfidy. Nancy Pelosi found intuitive evidence that John Boehner had gone over to "the dark side." John McCain became a dartboard after pleading with the Tea Party for compromise.

It took a midnight ride to the edge of the cliff to get the job done and only for the moment.

"For the moment" actually doesn't seem bad or daunting though. Two realities emerge at the end of the day.

First, Rome, indeed, wasn't built in a single day, like some 1920s oil boomtown. It seems silly, perhaps, to indulge in 500-year-old platitudes. (On the other hand, 500-year-old platitudes would not have been platitudinous unless they were true.)

To my mind, the Tea Party is an exemplary alliance of commendable and patriotic folk. Nonetheless, the fact is, that the Senate was never going to oblige the Tea Party by passing a balanced budget amendment. Even if it had passed one, so what? As the great Milton Friedman demonstrated, the thing you want to keep your eye on isn't the deficit; it's government spending as a percentage of the economy. Deficits come, deficits go. When they go, we want to be sure that doesn't excite lawmakers whose purpose in life is diverting more private sector resources to government.

What the political process has now—at its very worst—is a start toward fiscal responsibility—a rude, messy start, but still a start. The walls of Rome took their time rising. Similarly, the national debt express has for years been hurtling along at top speed. If we apply the brakes to federal spending, the express will slow, then stop. But, that's hardly the work of one decision.

The second reality we recognize is that democracy works—even when it doesn't suit us. Understand that the $14.7 trillion federal debt is a democratic phenomenon. We the people asked for the things we wanted, or thought we did. Our lawmakers obliged us. We must have liked what they gave us—Social Security, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.—because we kept re-electing these open-handed philanthropists. They assured us we could afford it. We fell for it—hard.

Even when democracy works without working just right, it can do its job—letting the people demand course corrections. The correction for which the Democrats seem headed in 2012 may not be as bad as Democrats fear or Republicans hope. Many Americans still favor the high, wide and handsome spending of money—especially money from other people's pockets. Nonetheless, the whole money, jobs and big government conundrum is now on the table for national consideration. The candidates and the public will talk of little else for the next year, which is how things are supposed to go in a democracy, when people are gloomy and worried.

Is this a transcendently splendid moment as default and downgrade anxiety—let us pray—subsides temporarily? No way! It's a lousy moment full of peril intensified by the high-volume screaming on political blogs. Yet, this is how democratic nations move forward as well as backwards: by having their say and charting or re-charting the way ahead. We'd do well to keep in mind that, that is what is going on right now in our most-of-the-time beloved nation.

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The redeeming feature of knockdown-drag-outs, by whomsoever initiated and howsoever decided, is that they focus attention on matters too urgent to be laid aside for future contemplation. In which category is the debt-ceiling brawl. It's like a family intervention over Dad's unseemly craving for Old Grand-Dad. The music has got to be faced.

The tune playing on the national Muzak for some decades is, ironically, that old Depression-era favorite, "We're in the money, Come on my honey, Let's spend it, lend it, send it, rolling along."

"How'd we get here?" is the question whose answer is, "Big Government, playing to our appetites."

"Big Government" long since became a political cliche—a standard substitute for the kind of thinking that might have identified and addressed the problem at its source. "Big Government" means government that helps everybody by spending money that belongs to nobody. Nobody in particular, anyway. We all put some in the pot, otherwise known as the Treasury. Who knows where it gets spent? Who can begin to imagine? "Big Government" means, accordingly, the evasion of responsibility: the ducking of duty to taxpayers.

The problem America remains unable to face—witness the current meat-cleaver massacre of cooperation in Washington—is how not just to get past the current wrangle over the debt ceiling, but to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again anytime soon.

The only way to make sure it doesn't reoccur is to follow more or less the House's passionate inclination and inform, most of all, the White House that we're NOW going to stop spending money we haven't got.

This makes for, in the oddest kind of way, a wonderful moment, a delicious one. One that's been too long in coming. To paraphrase the unexceptionable motto of Rahm Emanuel, we can't let this crisis go to waste.

Big Government and fiscal integrity aren't merely strange bedfellows. Eventually, though it takes time, as in our own country's experience, they become the political equivalent of Bordeaux and peanut-butter sandwiches. The sheer bigness of Big Government decrees this outcome. The more Government does, the more it gets called on to do. The more it accepts the call, the more heedless it becomes of apparent trivialities such as cost.

The debate over the size of government is one Americans have been trying to have since the Reagan years, rarely succeeding, in that the crisis was not quite bad enough. We can't make that claim anymore. Don't we suppose the Greeks—who are broke—are having such a debate? They are talking of nothing else.

Here we come now, animated by the same concerns as the Greeks and Portuguese and Spanish and Irish and Italians over what was once generally known as improvidence.

The question is: How well are we prepared to let the federal government absorb 25 percent of our economic output, not to mention the 40 or 50 percent that lies in our collective future unless the brakes are applied fast and hard?

That's what the whole unappealing, unappetizing debate is about in the end—how hard to hit the brakes so the private sector of the economy, instead of for once the public sector, can start growing again, creating jobs and prosperity.

A crisis indeed is a terrible thing to waste. Our finger-pointing, perpetually annoyed president, who loves Big Government so much he's worked to make it bigger ever since taking office, agrees with the Emanuel maxim, sort of. He just wants to define the crisis himself. The tea party Republicans and their allies won't let him, and that explains the sound and fury, and, well, isn't it all in a grim way kind of wonderful?

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In other words, there never was a human instinct that didn't continue to play out, century after century, millennium after millennium. Class resentment included: which explains polls purporting to demonstrate that a majority of Americans want to fight the federal deficit by raising taxes on those earning $250,000 a year.

Two hundred and fifty thousand is indeed a lot of bread, and you can see why poll respondents who work at the hardware store might lack innate sympathy for those who earn such a sum. True, we're not supposed to envy others—envy being one of the Seven Deadly Sins—but whenever the plate is being passed around, you may count on a raft of demands that those who earn the most should pay the most.

Actually they do already, generally speaking, while those who earn the least, plus some who earn as much as $50,000 a year, pay nothing at all in the way of income tax. The imbalances inherent in the present system—which ought to be thrown out the window, as everyone with a brain well knows—are not today's subject. Today's subject is the left's pathetic acquiescence in the nonsense that if we'd just squeeze the #*^&%$# rich harder, the government could turn to the serious business of spending their money in behalf of us all.

As this particular brand of nonsense never goes away, there's no surprise in hearing, say, (The Hill's finance and economics blog) that Democrats "are more than happy, messaging-wise, to set themselves up as champions of programs like Medicare and Medicaid while casting Republicans as defenders of millionaires and billionaires." Yes, take that, Paul Ryan, for daring to propose maintenance of the tax rate cuts engineered nearly a decade ago under George W. Bush.

The should-we-tax-those-rich-guys question, followed by the expected you-bet, shows Americans to be unserious about getting our finances under control. Sure, tax the rich—it's all their fault, right? Couldn't it be ours on account of demanding government favors and services larger than we seem able to finance? No need, in such an event, to reorder our larger priorities: just make the rich do it for us.

Horse feathers! Had Congress last year scrapped the rate reduction for over-$250,000 earners, the resultant gain to the Treasury for this fiscal year would have been $32 billion. That's assuming the intended victims sat still in order to be plucked rather than, as is far likelier, ferreting out new loopholes and exemptions.

The wealth of the wealthy is large, undoubtedly, but far smaller, in relative terms, than is often imagined. There is an old story about an agitator who supposedly went to see Andrew Carnegie, I think it was, demanding that Carnegie distribute his wealth to the poor. As the story goes, Carnegie, after listening, reached into his pocket, took out a quarter, handed it to the man and said, helpfully, "Here's yours."

Obsession with other people's money isn't humanity's only problem, but it's among the major ones blocking constructive overhaul of nearly all our financial assumptions. Why not just make the rich do everything? Saves time and elects Democrats—a persuasive way of looking at things if you're a Democrat; at least until you've stamped out the ability to rise financially, pulling up others as you rise.

The price of prosperity is putting up with rich blowhards and showoffs—does Donald Trump come to mind?—so as to make room for the rich who start hospitals, finance museums and symphony orchestras and, yes, create jobs; all the things you rarely hear about from certain politicians. Why should they tell you such things? If they did, you wouldn't vote for them.

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The divorce between home and public school classroom—accomplished by the end of the '70s—was a national calamity. To put it another way, once public education lost in great degree the robust support of the middle class, there was nowhere for things to go but downhill. And so they have slid for decades. Teachers parading around the Wisconsin capital like Jimmy Hoffa's truck drivers? It not only wouldn't have happened in ye olde days—it didn't happen.

The middle class and the public school classroom were hand in glove in a united enterprise. The former wanted—nay, expected—the latter to succeed. Johnny would read. Susie would con her multiplication tables. Because the middle class expected no less. Mothers and daddies weren't putting up with a lot of bad grades and bad behaviors. Stuff like that got in the way of education, which was about—for goodness' sake—urgent matters like personal advancement and civic betterment. Education made for a stronger, wiser America. That is what we believed—and why we supported teachers and principals.

You say I am generalizing. I am. Every assertion regarding the human experience is a generalization. The point is, we used to like teachers and support them. What happened?

The moral collapse of the middle class is pretty much what seems to have happened. As Whittaker Chambers noted in a different context, "History hit us like a freight train." We all, suddenly, wanted liberation instead of restraint and order and discipline—the prerequisites of good education. Someone at the top has to pass the word down the line: Here's what we're doing today, no back talk. What we were "doing today" wasn't always, in abstract terms, the best thing to be found out there, but it made for generally fruitful outcomes. Parents supported it, passing down to children the obligations of self-discipline.

Parents, I tell you, used to like teachers. Teachers liked parents in return. There was a kind of compact between them. Back us up, the teachers said, and we'll deliver the goods. The parents nodded their heads. OK.

That was until the compact came apart and society as a whole withdrew its support from the teacher: the teacher as authority figure anyway.

The compact came apart when the kids themselves took as role models all the fun-loving, war-protesting, authority dissing "campus activists," as the papers called them. You can't have a compact that no one is willing to enforce by—oh, scandalous word!—discipline. Educational standards took a tumble.

Wasn't every little kiddie a potential genius best left to himself? You might have thought so, listening to the discourse of the time. The federal judiciary's embrace of busing for racial balance further disordered the relationship between parents and public schools and drove a big hunk of the middle class into private schools or home schooling.

Home schooling: There's something to which no one gave a thought 50 years ago. It happens in the 21st century that some of the nicest, most dedicated people you could ever hope to know have chosen to instruct their kids at home: unable any more to trust the public schools with getting the job done.

Yes, teachers unions are arrogant; it hurts to see teachers laid off—that, too. And that isn't the end. The good teachers who still show up for work, compact or no compact, don't deserve the opprobrium and the turmoil in which so many are forced to operate. Lord, help 'em, they deserve better. And so—here is the genuinely grievous part—do the kids.

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Lately, we haven't thought much about that question in America; which is why Wisconsin takes us by surprise—the raging public employees, the adamant governor and the fugitive Democratic senators, hiding out to avoid a vote on stripping public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights. What's this? Teachers abandoning the students whose parents pay them?

It's the nature of the coercive approach, the union approach: here, give me your arm so I can twist it. Unionism doesn't work apart from organized force, as in the union heyday of the '30s and '40s. Unionism gained popular support in that day against supposedly heartless employers who expected workers to work on the terms they accepted when hiring on, not on those terms the union demanded, such as higher wages.

Unionism's chief coercive tactic is the strike—the withdrawal of services as a means of making employers do things the unions' way. The mere threat of a strike could make employers come around. Unions ruled the roost in late-industrial America—until paying the price of organized coercion became too great for employers who closed plants or took their work overseas.

Even before that, organized coercion was turning off the public. A wave of post-World War II strikes in steel, automobiles and electrical manufacturing disrupted daily life. John L. Lewis, of the flamboyant eyebrows and rolling rhetoric, led coal workers on strike in April 1946, causing much of the country's industrial production to shut down. The U.S. government took over the coal mines and imposed most of the union's terms on the owners. President Truman talked of drafting workers into the military if the railroad unions went on strike.

The Republican Congress, elected that year, passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, restricting organized coercion in various ways. Among them: banning the closed shop—i.e., you had to join a union to work—in states that adopted right to work laws. Among issues agitating Midwestern and Northeast public employee unions in 2012: proposals to pass right to work laws, as have 22 other states, and accord workers the right to refuse union membership.

Organized coercion by labor works in limited and specific ways. As we see, it can shut down schools in Wisconsin. It also works against itself. Basically, it undermines flexibility and freedom, two essential attributes of flourishing economies. A union that can say, "Do it our way, see?" is thinking in the terms of today rather than those of tomorrow—the province of businessmen alert to changing conditions that require constant adaptation. A union contract—the modern equivalent of the Law of the Medes and the Persians—is the last place you look for flexibility and permission to alter flagging or flabby strategies. Organized coercion abjures flexibility. What's good for one is good for all, might be its creed.

Naturally, organized coercion provides no room for individual dissent. The closed shop exists to keep dissent to a minimum. How else ya gonna present a united front? All together now: We want ... we want ... !

Human affairs since that messy business in Eden require constant rebalancing. The old unions weren't always wrong about the indifference of capitalists who minimized compensation and safety requirements to save money and cut corners. The human race, if we don't all know it by now, is generally nutty. What, all the same, is organized coercion save the dictatorial enterprise of people who, via their own membership, in humanity are as nutty as anyone else?

The marketplace, with its large space for choice and constant realignments of ideas and enterprise, is the forum that can reinvigorate America. That's what Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin sees, with a clarity and courage that do him honor.

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Won't it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off?

Nope. To Obamacare's proponents, opinion polls are irrelevant, except when the results tally with what they, the proponents, want to do. When results don't match expectations, too bad. Shut up!

Polls last year showing plurality support for stopping Obamacare in its tracks were understood, by the pro-Obamacare community, to reflect public confusion over the blessings that Congress was poised to bestow on us through partial nationalization of health care.

We just didn't understand, bless our hearts. The likes of Mrs. Palin and Glenn Beck had led us down the garden path. It was necessary that Congress pats us kindly on the national noggin and gives us what the polls showed, which most didn't want.

To be sure, repeal isn't going to happen this year—no matter the size of the House majority in favor of it, or such arguments as Republicans bring concerning the unaffordability of the whole enterprise. The exercise of debating and voting on repeal will have wonderful effects notwithstanding.

Last time around, debate hardly took place. Mrs. Pelosi was firmly in charge on the House side. Passage was a done deal. Cost and constitutional aspects got no airing apart from what the spunkier breed of Republican could manage on non-congressional turf.

At last, thanks to the November election, prospects exist for meticulous exposure of the bill's defects and delusions, among them the interesting theory that it's cheaper to put 30 million new people on government insurance than not to do so. Democrats should expect that such claims as they make without factual or logical substantiation will meet with informed, intelligent pushback.

It wouldn't be surprising to find proponents of repeal, at the grassroots level, downshifting a bit. We all know life is dynamic. A time-honored property of the human race is to take, however reluctantly, what life brings irrevocably, learning somehow to live with it.

When it comes to Obamacare, the necessity laid upon Republicans—one they have embraced—is to say, and say again, look, this thing isn't going to work the way they told you it would. It's going to cost more than we were led, intentionally, to believe. It's going to narrow the medical choices we make, and there's a good chance it violates the U.S. Constitution.

Such are the points Republicans indeed will make. Democrats, by the same token, will come back and say, hold on, that's not right and here's why. When they do, they had better have their facts and figures straight if they mean to engage in robust and nourishing floor debate with the likes of congressmen Paul Ryan from Wisconsin and Mike Pence from Indiana, who know at least as much about Obamacare as its watchful guardians on the Democratic policy side claim to know.

Nor will Speaker John Boehner essay to gavel down Ryan, Pence and their allies. He will insist they be heard—not to the exclusion of competing viewpoints, but rather to the end that we finally figure out the implications of this law that Mrs. Pelosi was so eager that we should embrace on the purity of her testimony and that of like-minded others.

No, repeal isn't going to happen this year. Something transcendently marvelous might happen instead—the infusion of understanding into this complex and vexing debate. And not only that. In consequence of such understanding, we might sense some way of finally solving the health care problem—which Republicans as well as Democrats acknowledge to be a problem—through better, cheaper, broader use of freedom-preserving marketplace measures.

Last year, the Obamacare Democrats told America to shut up and do as we say. Now they have to explain why and how. It's going to be fun listening in.

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