If only Ronald Reagan were alive to speak into the debate about government takeover of the health care system.
But take heart! Though he is gone, he speaks nonetheless!
Here is the Gipper himself in 1961 explaining at that time why citizens should actively oppose "socialized medicine." This is a 10 minute recording on a record album produced by the American Medical Association. But it's all Reagan: his thoughts on the subject; his eloquence.
Notice how he speaks directly to the ordinary American as an ordinary American himself without talking down or pretending to be something he was not. Notice also his appeal to political theory and the Founding. Notice lastly, that his appeal is not to prosperity nor to fiscal sanity, as good and legitimate as those are. His appeal is to the noble concern for liberty.
He closes with this warning:
If you don't do this [call your Congressman] and if I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
Yes--he saw socialized medicine itself as being decisive in the fight for liberty against socialism, which he viewed as antithetical to the American spirit and the American system of government, and which he identified with tyranny.
1 comment:
Well, it turns out that Americans do love liberty, after all, I was beginning to wonder David!
All's I'll say is this: keep the pressure up. That's the only way to prevent the sort of `corporatist' rule as occurs in Canada and in Europe.
As for Reagan, I've long thought his strength lay precisely in that he was a `citizen-president'.
When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the 1990s some time, Reagan issued a statement that began (in effect), "Like millions of other Americans, I have been diagnosed with A.'s disease..."
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