The "founders" and Socialized medicine

A meme going around that, in fact, the constitutional architects would have approved government run health care.  Adams approved funding for Government run hospitals for sailors in the late eighteenth century--funded out of a mandatory tax on the sailors and their employers.  

Original blog post here;  follow up by WaPo here; and a diss excerpt on the hospitals here.

All of this is interesting and useful information, but the focus shouldn't really be over how analogous the bills were (as the WaPo historian discusses) but how we still have this in principle today with military hospitals and the US military in general--which Chalmers Johnson calls one of the greatest bastions of socialism in the world.  The question that this historical trivia sidesteps is whether Adams or Jefferson would have approved the "standing" army of the size we have today. A good thing to remember in the week of the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" speech.