| GOOD AFTERNOON TO EVERYONE! |
| The government shuts down, even as ObamaCare launches… and promptly crashes and burns. Massive system errors have disabled most of the exchanges. Republican representatives who tried to sign up have been prowling the floor of Congress, holding tablet computers festooned with error messages.We’re all supposed to take this in stride as unremarkable launch-day “glitches,” to use President Obama’s term, even though our titanic mega-government spent three years and billions of dollars getting ready for this day. Only in the last few months did they start coming clean about the likely inability of a system Americans are forced to use, under penalty of law, to function properly.A big part of the technical infrastructure problem stems from the difficulty of getting incompatible government and private insurance databases to communicate with each other. That’s a good metaphor for ObamaCare in general. It’s a software program fundamentally incompatible with the American hardware expected to run it. This is not a nation where the government is empowered to nationalize industries, or use unconstitutional penalties – magically converted into “taxes” just long enough to slip them past the Supreme Court – to force citizens to purchase products they don’t want. This is not a nation where the chief executive is empowered to modify and disregard laws he dislikes, for nakedly political reasons.And yet, it’s the critics of this unworkable non-law who are denounced as “anarchists!” The public usually tunes in to shutdown and debt-ceiling dramas just in time to hear the smaller-government side castigated as extremists and obstructionists. But we could kill ObamaCare stone dead merely by insisting that everyone in Congress and the Administration obey it without exception. Talk about a system crash!
John Hayward |