The President of the United States is throttling health insurance companies. Health insurance companies, after the passage of ObamaCare, are naturally passing their costs along to customers. This means premiums for everybody, especially those purchasing their own health insurance, will rise by 20 percent in the coming year alone. Obama wants to threaten insurance companies so they don't do this. How? By moving up the date of taxes already to be imposed on them several years down the road. The strategy here is clear: Political, and short-term. It's an open strategy of "hold onto power, for just another year or two." If Obama can keep insurance companies from raising premiums in 2010, then (he reasons) his party will retain its control over Congress in 2010 and he'll be positioned for an easy reelection in 2012. After that? Won't insurance companies later on, after 2010 or 2011, eventually raise their prices? What if insurance companies get so heavily taxed and restricted that they no longer will stay in business -- since a business, by definition, must make a profit? That's somebody else's problem -- down the road. It's not Obama's problem, at least not according to Obama's supporters and Obama himself.

Don't people see this is how a dictatorship operates? I guess most Americans don't, because most of them, including their parents or grandparents, never lived under a dictatorship. (I haven't either -- but I still get it). Obama has so far kept his hands off elections and free speech -- other than tinkering around the margins, of course. (Or actually going beyond that by restoring the McCain-Feingold law struck down by the Supreme Court). Maybe Obama has no intention of calling into question the validity of elections -- even if they don't elect the people (including himself) he deems most suited to govern. Maybe he will step down in two more years, or six years tops. That has been the American tradition and practice for several centuries at least. But American traditions and practices, with respect to government, are collapsing all around us, with particular speed since late 2008. They are so widespread and sweeping, and so "awesome" (in a bad way) in their scope and magnitude, that it has been difficult for even more conscientious and freedom-loving Americans to absorb it all. This latest throttling of health insurance companies is yet the latest example. There will be two more by the end of the week, I promise you.

In the end, reason does not always prevail among men -- it certainly hasn't in America of late -- but objective reality is still always in charge. Facts remain stubborn things. Obama can't make the price of health insurance and medical care less than what it is, in a supply-demand context. Even Communist regimes, with unlimited totalitarian power, could not alter the laws of basic economics, and Obama, still hampered by some remnant of constitutional limits, certainly cannot. The more that government restricts health insurance companies, the more their prices will rise. The more he blackmails them into not raising prices, the less health insurance coverage there will be and the more health insurance companies will go out of business in the coming few years. That leaves us with: Monopoly government control over all medical care. Isn't that what Obama himself wanted, all along?

Wake up, America. This man is more than inept and overrated. He's much worse than a disappointment. He's just plain bad.