Lots of things happen when an incompetent administration bullies, lies, and buys off a nation into a breath-takingly complex experiment in government power grabbing in a critical area of every citizen’s life. Most of them are bad — catastrophic, even, especially for individuals — but one small positive thing we can salvage is the lesson.

So, let’s pause to thank the narcissistic head of that administration for the clarity. According to Obama voter Walter Russell Mead, “the most shocking ObamaCare revelation” is that “the President of the United States didn’t know that his major domestic priority wasn’t ready for prime time — and he thinks that sharing this news with us will somehow make it better.”

Adjusting for the attributes of this administration that give the impression of cosmic hyperbolism, that shocking fact actually may derive from a commonplace error of progressive thought… a sort of infant peek-a-boo game for politics… the notion that if one cannot see a harm, it does not exist.

This came up during the Wingmen segment on minimum wage. It might feel good to force employers to give employees more money, but advocates can’t see the people downstream in the chain of consequences whose lives become more difficult when case-by-case decisions are forbidden. The sympathetic target of the altruism may actually be the collateral damage from some prior decision that helped somebody else.

With ObamaCare, the administration allowed the consequences to come too quickly and the lines from handout to hindered to be too direct. They’re unmistakable.

Maybe Obama didn’t think he needed to pay attention to details because in every other progressive rewriting of reality, the consequences never stain the original good intentions. Like the Joshua computer in War Games, Americans should learn from Obama’s Tic-Tac-Toe that the game of central planning cannot be won.

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.