First they came for our health care...

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Sep 21, 2009 at 11:30:37 AM MST

From "The American Future," by Simon Schama:

In the report "written at a gallop" and delivered in fifty-five days, [Montgomery C] Meigs declared it a scandal that "the nation's most honored citizens" had to suffer through the heat and dust of a Washington summer, slaking their thirst only with dangerously corrupted water. The rememdy would doubtless be ambitious and therefore expensive, but Congress should think loftily when it came to the good of the commonweal for "water should be as free as air and always supplied by government."

Montgomery Meigs was the Quartermaster General during the Civil War. This excerpt deals with Meigs' proposal to build an aqueduct for Washington DC. The plan was adopted and Meigs supervised the project, which began in 1853. The aqueduct is still standing today.

Discuss. And feel free to make your own comparisons to health care, disparagement of the recent and - as Meigs would no doubt see it - destructive tendency to privatize public functions. And make no doubt of it - they want our water, too!