So, the Obama administration settled on the talking point pretty quickly, this morning, as people began to notice that healthcare exchanges across the country weren’t working very well. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was first out of the gate with a statement that Obama would repeat almost verbatim for TV and radio audiences:

“No one is calling on Apple to not sell devices for a year or to get out of the business because the whole thing is a failure,” she said. “Everyone just assumes there’s a problem, they’ll fix it, let’s move on. . . . Hopefully, they’ll give us the same slack as they give Apple.”

Here’s the thing: The government is not a business.  For one, government has made its product obligatory.  For another, the product involves safekeeping of highly sensitive personal information and the critical app of healthcare.

It’s just plain inappropriate for billions of taxpayer dollars to be handed to government agents so they can try their hand at running a start-up company.  When you force people to invest in a venture and then you require them to buy the product, you get less room for error than companies that raise money and put their own existence on the line to try something new (which consumers can reject).

That’s just the way things work, and being able to pretend that it is not is exactly why the incentives are all wrong for government’s entering into business ventures in the first place.