I say it's a watermelon

Likes Obamacare.

We live in strange times. The Supreme Court has pronounced Obamacare, under which the federal government will take over your health care and mine, a "tax." We all know it's not a "tax." Even Obamaman himself argued that it wasn't a tax.

So a law passed in late-night, weekend maneuverings on a strictly party-line vote, even as polls showed the American people opposed, and which nobody actually read before voting on it -- as Nancy Pelosi pointed out -- a law that assumes control of one-sixth of the economy, the one-sixth that will determine how long and how well we live, is a "tax."

Fine. A watermelon is a tax. Whatever.

I think we'll learn in six months that John Roberts has a brain tumor affecting his thinking.

The whole notion of federally-run healthcare is DOA. With computers, the Internet and cell phones, central control of anything is a dinosaur.

I saw a program on Bell Labs the other evening. It's where the transistor was invented -- the invention that eventually would make Bell Labs unnecessary. From its peak of 25,000 employees, it's now down to 1,500. Xerox' famous Palo Alto lab went the same way. The reason: companies today can tap into scientific minds anywhere in the world at any time -- without hiring them. They go to websites, post problems, and scientists bid on solving them.

Hierarchical corporations have collapsed -- all the action is on the edge of the network, not in the DOA ranks of middle management once needed to communicate and control.

The media were once centrally controlled. You had to own a printing press to make a newspaper or a TV network or a TV station to broadcast. Youtube anyone?

It's interesting that Obamaman has taken over student loans just as higher education is going through the "change." Middle class kids can't afford college anymore. And yet one university after another is offering courses for free online. The action is in your family room at your computer, not in an ivy-covered building on some far-off campus.

In the same way, forefront of health care is now a smart phone on a doctor's belt that can tell him everything about the patient in front of him, everything in the research about his condition, soon everything about his genetic makeup, and that can image his abdomen and help with a diagnosis.

This can not be helped in any way by bureaucrats and boards and politicians buying and selling votes and power in Washington.

The forces of change are irresistible, and Obamacare will fall under its own weight. It will just be very messy to watch.

Dan Henninger, the Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote before he knew what the decision was:

From day one, the Obama health-care legislation was swimming against the tides of history. It was a legislative monolith out of sync with an iPad world. In the era of the smartphone, ObamaCare was rotary-dial health reform. 

The signs this was so were everywhere, but Barack Obama and the Pelosi-Reid edition of the Democratic Party blew past them. Years before it arrived at the Supreme Court's door, the Obama health-care law was unpopular with the American public. With occasional exceptions, its unfavorables have been above 50% for nearly three years. And why not? It runs counter to the daily experience of virtually everyone.

Electronics, foods, fashion, entertainment, apps, social media, appliances—pretty much anything that escapes the cold hands of a public agency is laid before us in a dazzling, unprecedented array of choices. Despite all the incoming, people learned to navigate the options. Virtually everyone has become adept at customizing a personal milieu that suits them. Given a reasonably growing economy, they'll be able to sustain these choices. 

In this context, the Affordable Care Act gave new meaning to the word "outlier." Starting with the insurance mandate. Of course most people hated it. They're living in a world turning more anti-mandate by the minute, and the Democrats are ordering them all into a national health-insurance pool.

The Affordable Care Act is the exhibit du jour, but there is a disconnect nearly everywhere between governments and the reality of the way life is lived by the people they govern. Across Europe, the young are being drowned by something known as "the welfare state." It sounds more Orwellian than it did the first time. Other than the crude imperatives of survival amid a modernizing people, the Chinese Communist Party is clueless.

If you're counting on Social Security and whatever Medicare will become, you know somewhere deep in your soul that they won't be there. Neither will Obamacare (and now, with Nancy, I guess we'll have to read it to find out what the Supreme Court found in it). The future is elsewhere.

By the way, the name of Henninger's column is "Wonder Land."