Why can’t we get anything done any more? You know,

land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover “breakthrough” medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22, block an undersea oil leak…

Medical/psychiatric gadfly Bruce Charlton, professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham (in England), thinks he knows the answer: because the human spirit has been “overwhelmed by bureaucracy.” Those quotes are from a striking entry on Bruce’s blog, headlined “Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined.” Read the whole thing here. Bruce’s post struck me with particular force, as I came to it after reading a very melancholy email-bag of responses to my column on the FDA yesterday. I’ve been getting these quite heart-breaking emails from entrepreneurs who have tried to get new medical devices and procedures out into the marketplace in the teeth of massive bureaucratic resistance. “PMA” (for “Pre-Market Approval”) may be the most effective business- and job-killing device in the history of the world. PMA takes years (during which you have, of course, no revenue) and the bureaucracy is stupendous. One correspondent:

Our company attempted to gain a PMA starting back in 2003, with no success. By the way when we submitted our PMA application to FDA we were required to send 8 copies. Each copy weighed 33 lbs.

Maybe Charlton is right. Maybe this explains why subduing a bunch of goat-herds in the Hindu Kush is taking longer than it took to subdue the fully mobilized German and Japanese empires — a lot longer. And why sending Mexican illegals back home was a breeze in 1954 but colossaly impossible in 2010, and why we could conquer smallpox but can’t cure Alzheimers, and why it takes 15 years to execute a murderer, and why we can’t stop the gulf leak, and why…