There has been a lot of talk about the problems of Obamacare as its rollout begins. “Obamacare may be imploding,” says Reason Magazine. “Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are” says Forbes.

But what if these “problems” were fully expected and even desired by the more sophisticated perpetrators of Obamacare? What if they wanted it to fail? Why would they? Because they want its failure to lead to a total government takeover.

Ayn Rand’s villain Dr. Floyd Ferris in Atlas Shrugged comes to mind. At one point he lays all his cards on the table:

We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them…you create a nation of lawbreakers – and then you cash in on guilt.

Translation to 2013: if you don’t want to purchase health “insurance” we’ll make you a criminal. We’ll break your spirit and make you a helpless dependent. (Incidentally, I put “insurance” in quotes because, as Dr. Beth Haynes so ably demonstrated in a recent Huffington Post piece, health insurance has been almost entirely abolished and replaced by prepaid medical expenses).

Of course the millions of boobs who believed Obama’s lies about the “Affordable Care Act” won’t be told any of this. They will continue to get the party line spoon-fed to them.

And the Obamacare perpetrators will never acknowledge that it was doomed from the start. They’ll acknowledge glitches, delays and screwups. They’ll blame them on software designers, Republican sabotage, anything and anybody but themselves. They will echo Wesley Mouch, Rand’s bureaucrat-dictator: “I need wider powers.” When they feel the timing is just right, and just enough problems have become evident, they’ll spring the trap: “single payer;” translation: total government takeover.

Ah, but this is a fine line they’re walking. Obamacare’s failure could be more catastrophic than they figured. There just might be enough of the spirit of liberty left in the American electorate to generate a backlash. The Republicans might take the Senate next year (not that they deserve it). Ludwig von Mises taught that a mixed economy is unstable but whether a particular mixed institution (Obamacare being perhaps 90% statist and 10% market) will move toward freedom or away from it. Already the defenders of Obamacare are getting a little shrill, along the lines of, “it’s the law, get over it.” And speaking of law, Obamacare is not law at all. It’s a statute. It utterly fails the test of genuine law, grounded in the natural rights of man. No one has any moral obligation whatever to obey this statute.

So stay tuned. While Single Payer may seem inevitable, to be followed by assaults on the remaining semi-free areas of the economy, one never knows. We live in interesting times.