Who says government can’t get anything right?

It was just two years ago that the Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, scraped away decades of barnacled case law obscuring our beloved Constitution and unequivocally established the right of corporations, unions and wealthy individuals to spend as much money as they want to influence the outcome of elections.

A series of columns on the Washington regional economy is bound to generate a good deal of e-mail reaction, some of which I share with you today.

The request for big ideas brought lengthy, passionate briefs in favor of thorium reactors, nonstop flights to China, buried power lines, privatization of state and county liquor monopolies, agricultural clusters in the exurbs, more knowledgeable bank loan officers, more runways at Dulles, more bike paths and more trams in the inner cities. All worthy ideas, I’m sure, but not exactly the economic turbochargers I was seeking.

Every month, a group of Northern Virginia’s top business executives meets for cocktails, dinner and private conversation at — where else? — the Tower Club in Tysons Corner.

A lot has changed in the decades since George Johnson, then the president of the small, struggling George Mason University, first convened the 123 Club, in large part because of the efforts of the men gathered around Johnson’s dining room table.

Niall Ferguson doesn’t hide the fact that he means for his latest work of meta-history to take its place on the global bookshelf next to the rise-and-fall works of Edward Gibbon, Kenneth Clark, Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Samuel P. Huntington and Paul Kennedy. “Civilization” tackles the big questions: What is a civilization? Why do they decline? Why, for the past 500 years, have Europe and the United States dominated everyone else? And — here’s the payoff — is the West now destined to take a back seat to Asia?

Decades of rapid growth have made Washington real estate some of the most valuable in the country, particularly when it is close to the city center, along major roads and highways or near Metro stops.

Local economic boosters love to remind anyone who will listen that the Washington region boasts the greatest concentration of technical or knowledge workers in the country. The implication, of course, is that we’re right out there on the technological edge alongside Silicon Valley, Austin and Boston.

Washington has a lot to be thankful for as we enter the new year.

Since 2007, the region’s economy has grown by about 14 percent at a time when the national economy has expanded by about 3 percent. According to Stephen Fuller, my colleague at George Mason University and the go-to guy for statistics on the regional economy, growth here has exceeded that of every other metropolitan region.

There is a branch of economics known as game theory, which tries to figure out how various “players” in a market maximize their welfare based on the expected behavior of other “players,” all of whom are doing the very same thing.

Maybe you’ve noticed that companies that are already at the top of their industries have become rather brazen about trying to increase their profits and share prices by buying up their nearest competitors.

Monday morning at Ford’s Theatre, seven extraordinary people will receive an award from The Washington Post and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for being one of America’s top leaders. At a time when inspiring leadership seems to be in such short supply, it’s worth celebrating those who are doing it and reflect on the reasons for their success.

This past summer, billionaire Warren Buffett dusted off an old line about how his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, and ever since there’s been a running debate over tax fairness.

The reason Buffett’s overall tax rate may be lower than his secretary’s is because nearly all of his income comes in interest payments, dividends and profits on the sale of stocks and bonds known as capital gains. Under the George W. Bush tax cuts, the tax rate on this “unearned” income was reduced to a flat 15 percent, a level below the effective tax rate for most households earning more than $100,000 a year (Buffett’s is no ordinary secretary!).

The conventional wisdom on the season-jeopardizing dispute between the NBA and its players union goes something like this:

Millionaire owners and millionaire players are once again squabbling over how to divvy up a $4 billion annual booty, even as 15 million Americans can’t find full-time work and the average worker hasn’t received a raise in a decade.

The global financial system teeters on the edge of collapse because European politicians refused to tell citizens of their crumbling economies that they could no longer guarantee them “la dolce vita” — the sweet life — they had come to expect.

Silly you.

You actually thought companies existed to make products and profits.

You thought houses were meant to provide a place for people to live and office buildings a place for people to work.

You thought food was meant to be eaten, oil and gas to be turned into energy, and metals to be turned into cars, bridges and downspouts.

The Congressional Budget Office came out with an eye-popping report this week showing that the richest 1 percent of households captures 20 percent of the nation’s pre-tax income, up from 10 percent in 1979. During the same period, everyone else’s share — the 99 percent — went down.

Across most of the country, commercial real estate development has pretty much come to a halt. After a decade of debt-fueled overbuilding, there are too many hotels and too much retail space. With the economy generating precious few jobs, there isn’t much need for new office space, either. Debt financing has all but dried up.

“Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

— Herman Cain, from an Oct. 5 video interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray

I wish it were true.

I wish it were true that Occupy Wall Street could morph into our “American spring,” a left-wing counterweight to the tea party.

I wish it were true that this naive and incoherent movement could somehow turn itself into the long-overdue national protest against speculation and manipulation by a financial services industry that misallocated so much capital and talent and continues to keep much of the global economy on the edge of recession.

Take one financial crisis, fold in a federal budget crisis, add in a nasty recession and mix with two decades of rapid globalization, and what you have is a recipe for the deep economic insecurity now felt by much of the American middle class.

It’s been another bad week for government. Another budget impasse. More embarrassing revelations about the federal loan guarantee for a failed solar energy company. And, of course, those $16 muffins.

Don’t you wish government could get its act together and perform with the efficiency and competence of the private sector?

It’s been less than two weeks since President Obama spoke to Congress and the nation about the urgency of taking additional steps to stimulate job creation by increasing public and private spending in the short term. Since then, two things have happened.

Perhaps nobody has turned theoretical economics into moving biography so masterfully as Sylvia Nasar did in “A Beautiful Mind,” the story of a brilliant but psychotic mathematician, John Nash, who eventually conquered his inner demons with the aid of a loving wife and nabbed a Nobel Prize for economics for his pioneering work in game theory. Nasar’s haunting, uplifting tale, based on years of research and interviews, made for not only splendid reading but also a wonderful movie starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly.

If you came up with a bumper sticker that pulls together the platform of this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates, it would have to be:

Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.

It’s not just the 21st century they want to turn the clock back on — health-care reform, global warming and the financial regulations passed in the wake of the recent financial crises and accounting scandals.

It’s true — President Obama needs to focus on jobs. But not the kind of jobs you are probably thinking of.

I’m talking about Steve Jobs, another young leader who rose fast, hit a wall and came crashing down to reality but somehow managed to muster the brilliance and strength of character to stage the greatest comeback in corporate history.

It was only two years ago that there was a spirited debate about whether to break up the country’s biggest banks so the government would never again have to step in and bail them out for fear that a failure would trigger a financial panic.

Silly me. I thought the purpose of patents was to spur innovation by giving people who invent something the exclusive use of their innovation for a limited time.

There’s still some of that. But out in Silicon Valley, patents have become the competitive weapon of choice, used by high-tech giants to bludgeon rivals and crush upstarts.

Another great week for Corporate America!

The economy is flatlining. Global financial markets are in turmoil. Your stock price is down about 15 percent in three weeks. Your customers have lost all confidence in the economy. Your employees, at least the American ones, are cynical and demoralized. Your government is paralyzed.

Why is this happening?

Short answer: Because we never really fixed underlying structural problems in the U.S. and global economies that had been building for decades and caused the financial and economic crisis in 2008.

in Wellfleet, Mass.

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting barefoot and shirtless on a stool at a lunch counter a block from the beach in Ogunquit, Maine, gulping down a bowl of clam chowder.

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Two to three dozen medium-size clams

Bottled clam juice

Three small onions

Three celery stalks

Wellfleet, Mass.

Man, what a week that was!

Rupert Murdoch, who for decades made profit and sport running roughshod over competitors, public figures and anyone who dared to get in his way, was treated to a generous dose of his own medicine. Although the humbled press lord was able to quickly wipe from his face the cream pie hurled at him at last week’s parliamentary hearing, he won’t easily recover from the tire marks left on his back by the politicians, prosecutors and vengeful press pack. For a man who loves to rationalize the excesses of his media empire by claiming he was just giving the public what it wanted, it must have been particularly galling to see how many have shown up for a seat at his hanging.

This piece is part of a leadership roundtable on the right way to approach teacher incentives — with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.

This piece is part of a leadership roundtable with Post columnist Steven Pearlstein and five expert contributors — Governor Mitch Daniels, former Senate leader Tom Daschle, Harvard professor John P. Kotter, former Congressman Slade Gorton and Wharton professor Stuart Diamond — about the leadership issues at the core of the U.S. debt debacle.

Whatever you might think about the now-bollixed contract negotiations between the Washington Nationals and Jim Riggleman, it is a textbook example of an arms-length bargaining process between an employee looking to get the best job at the highest salary and a company looking to get the best manager at the lowest price.

David Brooks of the New York Times had a wonderful column the other day indicating that while he would be opining regularly about the upcoming presidential campaign, he would do so under protest. The reason: From his Hamiltonian perspective, the “two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problems at hand.”

I first met IBM in 1964 at the World’s Fair in New York City. You might say it was corporate love at first sight.

Like many small investors during that era, my father was a proud IBM shareholder, which among other benefits entitled us to passes for a special showing at the IBM pavilion. Once we settled into our seats, as I recall it, the entire audience was magically lifted 50 feet in the air and into a spherical, multimedia auditorium, where we were treated to a magical tour of the technological future. I can’t remember what we heard and saw, but I do remember wishing that it would never end.

Maybe you’ve noticed that the economy has been acting strange lately: Corporate profits and stock prices have grown much faster than the economy, while economic growth has significantly outpaced job growth. In the past, these things moved more in synch with each other.

The Good Mitt could be the next president of the United States. The Bad Mitt won’t make it past Super Tuesday. The problem for Romney is that he just can’t decide which Mitt he wants to be.

I found both Mitts while reading his obligatory pre-campaign book, “No Apology,” with the lapel-pin subtitle, “Believe in America.”

This piece is part of a roundtable with Post columnist Steve Pearlstein and four of our On Leadership expert contributors about the leadership questions surrounding Gen. Cartwright’s pass-over for promotion to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It was 30 years ago that lawyers from the Justice Department first went into court to ask a federal judge to break up AT&T, and much has happened since then. The breakup of the Bell system into long distance and the regional “Baby Bells.” The rush of new competition and the resulting drop in prices. The decline of wire-line service, and the explosion of voice and data over wireless broadband.

John Haltiwanger thinks he may have discovered one reason why the private sector is not creating more jobs this far into the so-called recovery, and if he’s right, it is cause for concern:

The U.S. economy has become less dynamic and entrepreneurial.

Ever since the first elementary school teacher rolled the first television set into the first classroom to air the first course offering from “educational television,” there’s been the hope and the promise that technology would revolutionize the way teaching and learning would be done.

One of the strengths of the American system has been its remarkable ability to adapt to changing circumstances. When things aren’t working, leaders lead, followers follow and we change them, incrementally if possible, boldly if not. If the new thing doesn’t work, we fix it or try something else until we get it right.

Newt Gingrich spent much of the past week explaining why he was against turning Medicare into a voucher program before he was for it.

That was after Mitt Romney rolled out his long-awaited explanation for why he was in favor of requiring individuals to buy a basic health insurance plan before he turned against that idea.

Who knew international finance could be so . . . riveting?

I won’t try to convince you that what’s really interesting about l’affaire Strauss-Kahn are the implications for International Monetary Fund policy and Europe’s debt crisis.

Ernst Volgenau is one of the good guys, and the government contracting firm he started 33 years ago is one of the crown jewels of the Washington region’s economy. Which is why we should pay attention now that his Fairfax-based SRA International is about to be sold to a private equity firm for a premium price of $1.89 billion.

Before Google could buy DoubleClick and AdMob, the Internet giant needed to get antitrust approval from the Federal Trade Commission.

But when Google wanted to buy ITA, a leading maker of travel software, the review was conducted by a different agency: the antitrust division of the Justice Department. It was also Justice that earlier nixed the idea of a merger with Yahoo.

Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, with the budget battle raging and the government about to max out its credit card, the members of Congress have returned to the Capitol, and anticipation is in the air.

Will Vice President Biden hammer out a budget deal with bipartisan representatives before the debt ceiling is reached?

It has been less than three years since the global financial system nearly imploded, and even now much of the global economy has not fully recovered. Which makes it all the more shocking that a collective amnesia has already set in about what we’ve just been through and why it happened.

Part of the job description of the Treasury secretary is to declare at every opportunity that it is in the interest of the United States to maintain a strong dollar and preserve the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. To do otherwise would risk triggering a run on the dollar and a tidal wave of political denunciation.