Obamacare is not a law that Congress and the President negotiated together and passed.
As Hayek pointed out: Socialism needs a central plan. There are an infinite possible number of different central plans, any one of which will step on the toes of quite a lot of people, so one can never get majority support for any one central plan, or even the support of a significant plurality for any one central plan.
So the ordinary procedures of legislative rule will not work, will never come to agreement. And, as we saw, they did not work, did not come to agreement.
The normal procedure for passing laws, as laid down in the constitution, is that one house of the legislature passes an act, and the other house agrees to that act, and then the president signs it.
But what in fact happened is that neither house would vote for a version of Obamacare that the other house would accept, nor one that the president would sign.
Obamacare was passed by the mysterious extraconstitutional process of “reconciliation”, resulting in a bill that neither house has ever voted for, which contains numerous amendments rejected by both houses, and fails to contain numerous amendments accepted by both houses, thus was not “reconciliation” at all, but the permanent government overruling the merely elected government when the merely elected government was unable to reach agreement.
After being passed by this extraconstitutional process, it was further amended by presidential decree, an unprecedented extraconstitutional action,
This abandonment of constitutionality and legality is an unavoidable consequence of socialism.
To implement socialism one needs a single individual, or a very small cohesive group, small enough to sit around a coffee table and feel each other’s breath, with immense power.
Ever since Reagan decreed unlimited free healthcare for the poor and illegals, we have had socialism without a central plan. It works very badly.
Our ruling elite think themselves terribly smart people and are sure they can do better, and I am sure any one of them could do better. I am equally sure that one hundred of them can not do better, and will very likely do a great deal worse. If power is too diffused in the legislature for the legislature to give effect to socialism, it is also too diffused in the permanent government for the permanent government to give effect to socialism.
Indeed, that is the basic problem with the permanent government. Power is diffused, leading to the tragedy of the commons, public money being a commons, and power over the subjects of the government being a commons. That we are ruled by an unelected government is not the problem. Democracy sucks. That the permanent and unelected government lacks a czar with the power to defund any activity, fire any bureaucrat or group of bureaucrats for any reason or no reason at all, impose a loyalty oath, and shoot any bureaucrat that violates his loyalty oath, is the problem.
Obamacare illustrates that democracy has been dead for a long time. So does gay marriage and affirmative action. The problem, however, is not so much lack of democracy, as absence of a central power. The rationale for government is to make one decision for all, in particularly, and most importantly, the decision of war or peace, that if it chooses peace, permits no one to cause trouble, if it chooses war, commands all to harm the enemy. But, in fact, our government is not capable of making one decision for all. It is anarcho tyranny.
A common semi humorous definition of anarcho tyranny is that everything is illegal (that is the tyranny) except crime, which is legal (that is the anarchy)
But a more serious definition is that the government is vast, powerful, intrusive (that is the tyranny) but is itself anarchic, itself subject to the tragedy of the commons (that is the anarchy)
The one definition, of course, tends to cause the other definition. The government being itself anarchic is uninterested in upholding law, since the rule of law, though it would benefit everyone, would not particularly benefit any one member of the government that himself attempted to uphold the rule of law without support from other members of the government, and the government being itself anarchic cannot restrain any one member of government from capriciously deeming any act by any subject illegal and punishing it.