Check Your Premises

Thanks to one of the many subscribers to ReturnToExcellence.net who I have never met but who found the blog on the internet & sent this link of a video of President Reagan talking about the dangers of socialized medicine in 1961.  A longer version of this piece was posted on the blog some time ago but the backdrop photos in this one are current & educational.    

 

In the video President Reagan points out that one of the best ways of imposing socialism on a people is by way of medicine like disguising a medical program as a humanitarian project - sound familiar? 

 

Compassionate people, like Americans, do not want to reject medical care for people who can't possibly afford it & throw them out on the streets to die with no medical attention.  But thinking people will also wonder what insurance-less people did before employer provided medical insurance started in the 1940s & socialized medicine began in 1965 in America under LBJ?  Were there ever thousands of people dying on the streets of America or was there a different culture of personal responsibility & no incentive whatsoever for the current moral hazard that encourages people to prefer & even fraudulently game government welfare-dependent programs?

 

The questions like those above can always be presented to lead to a desired (emotional) conclusion but President Reagan knew how to re-direct & re-state the questions because he understood that whenever he faced a seeming contradiction of what was right or wrong that it was the supposed victims who really made the injustice possible.  In these occurrences he relied on one of the main principles of probably the best book he & many of us ever read - "whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises."