In spite of two weeks of government shutdown (read: paid vacation for non-essential bureaucrats), federal regulators are set to add the fifth-highest annual number of federal regulations in history. If the trend continues to the end of the year, the Federal Register (which compiles all of the federal regulations in any given year) for 2013 will include 3,604 new federal regulations. That’s about one new regulation every 2 and a half hours of a working day. Just wow.

Bureaucrats write so many regulations because apparently that’s their only job. And these additional federal regulations continue to be generated no matter how useless or debilitating they are. Even Obama, master blame-shifter that he is, indicated that an excess of federal regulations contributed to the initial failure of the Obamacare website. In an interview with Chuck Todd, he said:

You know, one of the lessons — learned from this whole process on the website — is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right?

Right. Which is why many people of sound mind question the feasibility of government-run healthcare in the first place. Because of efficiency-enfeebling federal regulations, the civil government can’t even code a functional website, even when they are given nearly unlimited resources and years of development time. And we’re to expect that this same government hamstrung by federal regulations can navigate the even more complex arena of national healthcare? And not only this, but make it cheaper and more efficient?

No. That’s not reasonable. And the solution to this glut of regulations should be a repealing of regulations, right? And perhaps a shrinking of bureaucratic employment? No. Apparently, the problem is not a glut of federal regulations, but a deficit. Apparently, the federal government is failing because it has too little control. As Ann Althouse has written:

This [the failure of government bureaucracy to accomplish what the private sector delivers every day] should have made [Obama] sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he’s focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there’s no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.

Instead, we’ve been told we must buy a product, and things have been set up so we can only go through the government’s market (the “exchange”), and the government has already demonstrated that its market doesn’t work. But you can’t walk away, you’re forced to buy, and there’s nowhere else to go. And yet, he wants us to feel bad about the cumbersome bureaucracy the government encountered trying to procure the wherewithal to set up the market it had already decided we would all need to use.

Boom. All of us saw this coming though. Well, except for the majority of Americans, but they don’t see anything coming, being blind. As Gloucester said in King Lear: “’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.”