First, an old joke:

A young boy needs help with his grade school paper so he decides to ask his father. “Daddy, I have to do a paper on the difference between theory and reality. Can you help me?”

The father responds, “Well son, do you know what those words mean?”

“Yes, but I could use an example.”

The father thinks for a minute then tells his son to run upstairs and ask his sister if she would sleep with a complete stranger for 1 million dollars.

The kid goes upstairs and comes running back down, “Daddy, daddy, she said she would!”

The father then tells the kid to go into the kitchen and ask his mother if she would sleep with a complete stranger for a million dollars.

The kid goes to the kitchen and comes back, “Daddy, daddy, she said she would too!”

The father says, “There you go son. Theoretically we are sitting on 2 million bucks but in reality we’re living with a couple of whores.”

This excellent blog post brought that old gag to mind. Anyone with experience bidding government IT projects knows exactly why ObamaCare is collapsing. Not just the website, which is a bit player in this story. The whole thing is collapsing.  This is a good insight:

This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.

Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.

Social democracies like ours take this approach with all projects. It is why government seems to be getting increasingly inept. Fifty years ago NASA could go from zero to moon landing in five years. Seventy years ago America went from no army and in depression to conquering the world while beating Hitler and Tojo within a decade. Today, they can’t build a website in five years. Here we are 12 years on and the World Trade Center is not completed. The Empire State building was built in a year, start to occupancy. Contra the blogger, it is not just technology. It is everything. Obama announced last week that he and his team were stunned to learn that insurance is complicated. How is it possible that an American could possibly have made it to adulthood not knowing this?

That’s the lesson here with ObamaCare. The people in charge only have a vague understanding of how our highly complex modern society works. They know America through polling, policy debates and campaigning. The political class is thoroughly insulated from the land over which they rule. In many respects, they are the English ruling France during the 100 Years War. The managerial class, public and private, is similarly insulated, but not completely. The public side is immune from the consequences of the rulers but they deal with the subjects enough to know a fair bit about reality in these lands. Their loyalties, however, are to the political class as evidenced by the Census and IRS scandals.

In that regard, ObamaCare is emblematic of what’s wrong and a good proxy for what we can expect going forward.