With weekly revelations of new failures of Obamacare, it is tempting to join the chorus of "I told you so", but that would obscure the much broader and more important "I told you so" involved. To wit:
Obamacare did not fail entirely because it was a bad plan (though it was). It failed because no group of men and women sitting in Washington -- no matter how smart they are (or think they are in the case of Pelosi and Reid), no matter how many MDs, PhDs or LLDs follow their names, no matter whether a D or R is appended-- can design something that will work better in complex markets than what the markets themselves evolve.
A critical adjunct to this understanding is that markets themselves do not always work well in Version 1.0 (ask anyone who tried to run Windows prior to 1998). It takes constant iteration to approach a well-functioning system. And those iterations are not without casualties. In fact it is failure itself that is the essence of the process and why government will always produce inferior results. In government, iterative failure (and associated learning) is not allowed to happen. Systems are rarely adapted to meet people's needs and desires. People must be manipulated and coerced to fit the system that has been designed. Government's motto is:
When you try to put a square peg in a round hole, it is the responsibility of the hole to change.
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