Obama Shrugs Off the American People and the US Constitution

Daniel J. Mitchell @ Townhall:

Check out this blurb from a Fox News story.

Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. …Firms will be required to certify to the IRS–under penalty of perjury–that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs.

When this story first came to my attention, thanks to James Taranto, something seemed eerily familiar.Where had I read about a government ordering companies to freeze in place their employment levels.

I went through all the usual suspects in my mind. Was it Argentina? Was it France? How aboutCalifornia?

And then it struck me that life was imitating fiction. Obama’s policy is so bad that it resembles a scene in an Ayn Rand novel.

In her most famous work, Atlas Shrugged, the political elite try to halt the economy’s decline by imposing Directive 10-289, which seeks to freeze in place all factors of production – including the number of workers at each firm.

All workers, wage earners and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment.

Obama’s latest diktat doesn’t go nearly as far as Directive 10-289, thankfully, but it’s more than a bit disturbing that we’ve gotten to the point where a bunch of hacks in Washington think that they have the right to tell private companies how many people they’re allowed to have on the payroll.

But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

MORE:

President Obama has set in motion forces that he can’t handle

From economic policy to energy policy to environmental policy to foreign affairs to national security to border security to you name it, the president failed the test, but we re-elected him anyway. Obama’s misadventures in the Oval Office are becoming the stuff of legend. Benghazi and Fast and Furious are two of his more high profile blunders, but they aren’t the only ones. If George W. Bush had committed just one of those offenses, the mainstream media would have demanded his head on a platter, but they gave Obama a free pass. The nation as a whole became complicit in the president’s shenanigans because we didn’t demand that he be held accountable.

President Obama has done one thing superbly well: he has demonstrated skill par excellence on a national scale as a community organizer. He is second to none when it comes to inciting, agitating, race baiting, stoking fears, and motivating the masses. If you discount voter fraud, more than anything else, those skills got him re-elected. But like a snowball gathering momentum as it rolls down a hill, the forces that he has unleashed will be impossible to stop without pain and suffering.