Just like Clark Kent could change into Superman, President Obama has a remarkable ability to change into King Obama.
Tired of that pesky Constitution? Irritated that the Founding Fathers created a system based on separation of powers? 
Well, there’s a superhero to overcome those obstacles.
Faster than a last-minute Obamacare reg! More powerful than the Tenth Amendment! Able to leap the enumerated powers clause in a single bound! (“Look! Up in the sky!” “It’s a bird!” “It’s a plane!” “It’s SuperPresident!”)… Yes, it’s SuperPresident … strange visitor from corrupt Chicago, who came to Washington with powers and hubris far beyond those of the Founding Fathers! SuperPresident … who can change the course of the Constitution, bend the Bill of Rights in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Barack Obama, mild-mannered uniter who stops the rise of the oceans and heals the planet, fights a never-ending battle for redistribution, statism, and the French way!
And what has our superhero done lately?
He’s arbitrarily and unilaterally changed the Obamacare law.
Since it’s the 18th time he’s done that, this may not seem very newsworthy. But the latest change is particularly interesting because the President is ordering certain companies to maintain their existing payrolls.
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 about California?
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.
This isn’t the first time that the real-world unfolding of Obamacare has resembled a scene from Atlas Shrugged. Back in 2011, I wrote about how the waiver process for escaping the law was almost identical to the corrupt system of unfreezing railroad bonds in the book.
P.S. While searching online to get the details of Directive 10-289, I saw that John Sexton, writing for Breitbart, beat me to the punch.
P.P.S. If you prefer to get anti-statism satire from Superman instead of Atlas Shrugged, you may enjoy this cartoon.
International Liberty 
[…] I also expressed disappointment when President Obama arbitrarily and unilaterally decided to override or overlook laws that were […]
[…] pushing through the radical parts of his agenda. Yes, it’s true that recent presidents (both Obama and Trump) have sought to expand a president’s power to unilaterally change policy, but I […]
There are ways to reduce the size of companies sometimes done to reduce attractiveness to jackal lawyers in case of lawsuit (thanks to the “deep pockets” notion from Marxism). And divisions can be sold off, as has been done to reduce size for same reason.
[…] Though we shouldn’t mock the Canadians too much. After all, Barack Obama imposed a version of Directive 10-289 in the United States. […]
[…] Since I’ve already used it when writing about France, Greece, and Detroit (as well as what happens in Washington), I probably be careful about going back to the well too often with the Atlas Shrugged […]
[…] Since I’ve already used it when writing about France, Greece, and Detroit (as well as what happens in Washington), I probably be careful about going back to the well too often with the Atlas Shrugged […]
Is Obama altering from President to king or dictator, to a number, definitely like Clark Kent to Superman? Maybe the similarity is who and/or what is definite. Superman may be more an Earth name or terminology to describe a certain extraterrestial.Then after arriving on Earthhe dawns “a new identity” with the names Clark Kent. Whatever a United States President and king, monarch, dictator,etc. of a country is, Obama may be one of them “officially”, deserving of separate descriptions to numbers of people coinciding of what are similar to absolutist, despot, etc., mixture, none, a separate classification, intermittent, hiding what and/or who he really is, more mixtures, and/or an entirely separate thing.
Noting good and goodness of Earth and coordinating same onto innocents…
Earth’s more than a name.Not being bad to innocent people may be same of ontoEarth. It’s of coordinating with protecting no less than good people like a way of The Earth from various what’s not Earth. One may note upgrade with a coordination direction.One may note what Earth has.One’s on Earth.What’s like the harmony one has on Earth getting it from Earth? It’s a type which it is.It may be good there are similar and proceed from there.Is it okay to believe what’s more good is more with the goodness of Earth and its nature? One may note a separation of various words from the materializing them. One may include comprehensions of various words and their natures.One belief is it good not to interfere with rightful choices.One wants good on Earth. One wants a good Earth. Goodness on Earth may more than abet a good Earth.One may think of Earth a planet place with good people and not separate. Also a way more to get, have, and keep.Hold like The Earth holds and upgrade.Anti-right may more be incorrect separations of no less than good people from The Earth on which they live and may prosper. Earth has its way. No less than good people have and may have theirs and one’s. It can be more to coordinate with Earth’s way of protecting.Then upgrade.It’s okay to upgrade well.
Each day is Earth Day.Earth’s there daily.One may believe more than one antidote against despots looking wanting Earth and their ways to proliferate.Is Obamacare Obamascare?Looking to subtract by looking to make people add to what they more are not wanting nor requiring.
[…] we’re talking about the corruption of the IRS, the deliberate disregard of the law for Obamacare, or the NSA spying scandal, the White House has shown that it’s naive to assume […]
[…] Think think Joe might appreciate this: Obamacare, Atlas Shrugged, and the Imperial Super-President | International Liberty […]
Hitler’s government controlled all the activities of businesses also.
Hello! I know this is sort of off-topic but I needed to ask.
Does running a well-established blog like yours require a lot of work?
I am brand new to operating a blog however I do write in my diary
every day. I’d like to start a blog so I will be able to share
my personal experience and thoughts online. Please let me know if you
have any suggestions or tips for new aspiring bloggers.
Thankyou!
“The Divine Right of President Obama?”
“How to Build a Post-Constitutional America One Death at a Time”
By Peter Van Buren:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175807/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_the_divine_right_of_president_obama/#more
in a post-constitutional American leader… combine the ego of Russian President Vladimir Putin… [minus the testosterone]… the surveillance instincts of Communist China’s President Xi Jinping… the economic policies of Socialist President François Hollande of France… and the statist mindset of Richard Millhouse [I am not a crook…] Nixon… and what do you get?
something that will not end well………………….
There is not much to worry. Once The American People are given enough “free stuff” and their standard of living returns to the world’s top ten percent — from the current wretched and depressed twelve percent — then The American People will be all the more grateful and start working extra hard. And the greedy, those addicted to money, those who sabotaged the people’s dream for so long, will also work extra hard to recoup their losses.
It’ll all work out in the end, you’ll see. We’re on our way to a cultural paradigm shift. A more compassionate society where people are glad to take energy otherwise devoted to their families and instead offer it to the benefit of distant others – even if that involves some coercion where necessary.
But even if there is ultimately a net decrease in aggregate American desire to produce, that is a price worth paying. We have plenty of competitiveness margin against the next group of most competitive nations in the world. Don’t we? We sure can expend some of that advantage towards a more equal, more French society.
But even if we do not have the competitiveness margin, the remaining seven billion people of this planet will sure be patient with us and cut us some slack. At least until we can get our bearings back together, and so that we, the American middle class, can maintain our standing in the top ten percent of world prosperity. Won’t the rest of the world accommodate us? They must feel some compassion! Look at the sorry state of the American middle class!
But even if world compassion is absent, if things do not work out, and we start declining as a nation, we can just renounce these HopNChange ideas and return to what we had before. So as the country starts declining, and our standard of living starts merging towards the worldwide average, we will regurgitate a couple of decades of HopNChange, and in the midst of a declining standard of living, we will rush to the polls and roll back and renounce all the free stuff we voted ourselves all these years. Isn’t this how other nations reacted and reversed their decline?
You have a long-long way ahead, dear American voter-lemming…
It may have a slight different color, but it’s the same banana peel that broke the back of one many nations past…
A small minority of profit seekers is having a fit that at last: A Man-Of-The-People is on his way to finally force those with ability to serve those with need.
Next comes the directive to force consumers to buy products (slightly more expensive, slightly inferior or both) from those companies that cannot compete.
We are on our way down a litany of laws to finally constrain and squeeze the balloon of people trying to make profit out of the selfish American society! But that balloon will pop before it gets squeezed.
What most, especially voter-lemmings, refuse to comprehend is that the end of unique American prosperity, as they have known it for the past century, will come much-much before aggregate American motivation to work tanks. American aggregate motivation to produce is now likely below the next group of emerging most competent nations in the world. We are thus likely living on short lived momentum, the few short years of the great smorgasbord, the happy years when things are becoming free, the few short years before the turbulent cycle of decline, where a desperate electorate, losing prosperity standing in the world, angrily flocks to the polls to further flatten the effort-reward curves. Often, great surprises, great inflection points are just around the corner. And as everything human is irreversibly accelerating in this early 21st century, these surprises will become ever denser and frequent along the human history timeline. Ascents and declines that used to take centuries, will now conclude in a few short decades.
Indeed, these are the right times to follow France! Americans, in destroying what once separated them from the rest of the world – steeper effort/reward curves whereby the exceptional were not burdened with supporting the mediocre – an environment that indeed propelled even the mediocre into the world’s top ten percent of prosperity. In destroying this uniqueness and following France Americans are for sure proving one thing: Their world renowned naiveté.
The American prosperity after the reign of Barak Obama Augustus will be short lived. In the 21st century, things will be moving so fast that finally voter-lemmings will not be able to push the consequences of their short-sightedness to future generations. They, themselves will cook in the soup they are making following the French recipe.
President Obama is not the Imperial President, he is the Criminal President
I just sent this article to all four of the Congressmen in Arkansas and to Senator Boozman too. Not only that but I sent it to over 40 conservative Representatives in Washington who have repeatedly voted against increases in the debt ceiling. What a great article it was Dan. Keep up the good work!!!
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Dan from Dallas
So now the companies who will reduce workforce #s are motivated to reduce to employees levels to several positions below the amount needed to just fit under the law…..to avoid the perception of the law being the sole motivation?
I’ve thought of Directive 10-289 many times during the Obama administration. Next comes the Executive Order stating that companies cannot relocate without the Fed’s permission.