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Among Sarah Palin's many dips into The Gipper's Treasury of Folksy Wisdom was this little treat:
It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.The threat to freedom Reagan was talking about? Well, as Jon Chait points out, it was Medicare. One of Reagan's earliest political initiatives was an LP he recorded for the American Medical Association's campaign "Operation Coffeecup." Operation Coffeecup enlisted the wives of doctors to invite all their friends over to hear the new "Ronald Reagan" record. According to the AMA, it was important that the women didn't inform their friends of what the Reagan record was actually about. So when they did sit down over their cups of coffee, what they absorbed was an unexpected jeremiad against...Medicare, which was then before the United States Congress. Here's Reagan:In case you don't want to sit through the whole 11 minute shpiel, here's the relevant bit:
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.[...]You and I can do this. The only way we can do it is by writing to our congressman even if we believe he’s on our side to begin with. Write to strengthen his hand. Give him the ability to stand before his colleagues in Congress and say, I heard from my constituents and this is what they want. And if you don't do this 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.Yep, free to watch the elderly die from treatable illness because they didn't have health care coverage. It would be interesting to ask John McCain, a Medicare recipient, and Sarah Palin, if they believe Ronald Reagan was right in that passage. Did the enactment of Medicare end the days in America when "men were free?" If so, would they repeal Medicare? Or was the Gipper something of a hysterical radical whose comforting drone could make a cartoon version of Hayek sound like a bedtime story?
