Another Step Toward Socialism

The invaluable Mark Steyn has a great post over at The Corner about health care.

The money quote from his piece, from Kim Strassel at WSJ:

So why the stubborn insistence on passing health reform? Think big. The liberal wing of the party—the Barney Franks, the David Obeys—are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.

This isn’t about altruism; it’s about making their dreams of permanently socializing the United States a reality, just as is every move that this administration has made.

Newt Gingrich once said that “a culture can be lost in one generation“; we are now living in that generation.

At what point do we reach “the point of no return”, when these massive changes in the innate mechanics of our capitalist system are irrevokable? At what point do these malevolent liberals do such mortal damage to our beloved republic, that the republic, as we know it, ceases to exist?