While reading the last essay, “Requiem for Man,” in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal I came across the following quote that I thought was particularly apt given that Obamacare has “gone live,” more or less, across the country.

This particular essay was Ayn Rand’s response to an encyclical from Pope Paul VI in 1967, which she summarizes as being “the manifesto of an impassioned hatred for capitalism.”

But, you say, the encyclical’s ideal will not work?  It is not intended to work.

It is not intended to relieve suffering or to abolish poverty; it is intended to induce guilt.  It is not intended to be accepted and practiced; it is intended to be accepted and broken – broken by man’s “selfish” desire to live, which will thus be turned into a shameful weakness.  Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve never lift their heads thereafter – and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved.

Upon reading this quote I could not help but compare it to Obamacare.  The consensus of many is that there is no way for it to actually work.  From the adverse incentives created that will tend to keep young and healthy people out of the exchanges, to community rating, to guaranteed coverage, and many more provisions, it is guaranteed that overall prices will rise.  And if sufficient young and healthy people are not buying insurance and subsidizing the ill and aged, costs will go up, causing more people to choose to opt out of the exchanges until they are sick, which will in turn drive prices higher and on and on.

Some have suggested, as Ayn Rand did of the plan put forth in the encyclical 46 years ago, that it was never intended to succeed.  It was intended to be impossible and ultimately expensive so that the statists in government would be able to point at the “selfish” insurance companies and blame them for the failure, thus paving the way for a single payer system.  A complete take over of health care by the government.