I am inclined to see a dark omen in President Obama’s “fix” to the Obamacare rollout fiasco. As Yuval Levin explains, the president is now picking and choosing which parts of the law to enforce in an utterly ad hoc fashion, without even the slightest pretense of seeing that the laws are faithfully executed as the Constitution requires of him. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, in order to control economic outcomes, the socialist state must make the operation of the laws arbitrary and unpredictable.
I was brooding on this dark theme yesterday when I came across a “news analysis” in the New York Times that made me laugh out loud: “Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response.” From America’s paper of record:
The disastrous rollout of [Obama’s] health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.
The analysis gets even more inane (Obama has it worse than Bush because of recalcitrant Republicans, etc., etc.) but the analogy fails hilariously for the simple reason that Bush didn’t create Hurricane Katrina in the first place. But if he had, the analogy to Obamacare would be perfect.