Mark Steyn's latest column, posted at National Review, considers the handiwork of our brilliant elites who are spawning a "post-work economy," featuring an ever-growing "dependency class" and a "vast bureaucracy that ministers to them," with the president's eponymous health care program as exhibit A:

It's not merely that the website isn't state-of-the-art but that the art it's flailing to be state of is that of the mid-20th-century social program. The emperor has hipster garb, but underneath he's just another Commissar Squaresville.

With his trademark wit, Stein contrasts Obama's tired theories with the visionary ideas of Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and he brilliantly exposes what "every initiative of the Obama era" shares: a nudge toward more government dependency and less self-reliance. 

With self-reliance "intimately connected to human dignity," a dependent citizenry is "ultimately incompatible with liberty," as Steyn observes:

The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn't just be "economic inequality," but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

We now watch in real time the serial damage the Democrats are wreaking on our health care system, with the economic security and medical welfare of millions of Americans becoming road-kill on a path paved with good socialist intentions.

Obama's once hip hope and change, not to mention his utopian health care scheme, are no more than the misbegotten progeny of dismal past failures, with the same inevitable result.

The president recently declared that his health care law will not be repealed as long as he is president, even as the rest of us feel the economic ground shifting beneath us, in shock at the changes underway and in fear of what is to come.

Or, as Steyn explains, health care is "an irredeemable downer for the foreseeable future."

As we head rapidly down the path to failure and dependency under Obama's Democrats, Steyn defines a direction that only economic dullards or left-wing ideologues would take us:

One wouldn't expect the governing class to be as far-sighted as visionaries like Bezos. But it's hard to be visionary if you're pointing in the wrong direction. Which is why the signature achievement of Obama's "hope and change" combines 1940s British public-health theories with 1970s Soviet supermarket delivery systems...

Look out below.

Read the whole column for the full Steyn treatment of Obama's dismal agenda of the past.