Remember when men were free?

A Hollywood political activist type explaining the dangers of government intrusion in the health care system:

The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . . All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

He concludes by warning us that, if this government program is adopted, "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."

Chilling stuff. If only we could fast forward about 50 years and see if he's right. We're in luck! This warning was issued in 1961 by celebrated actor Ronald Reagan and he was talking about the looming prospect of Medicare. You can listen to it on this LP sent out by the AMA at the time: Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.

Sadly, we were all born too late to know what America was like when men were free: those golden years before Medicare was implemented. And now, comrades, all we have left is this totalitarian hellhole.

Beware conservative alarmism.