The long history of conservative lies to scare us away from new ideas

Recently someone dug out Reagan's 1961 scare tactics against Medicare --

"First you [the governement] decide that the doctor can have so many patients. ... 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 live somewhere else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. Pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school where he will go or what he will do for a livin, but will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do. ..."

And if you don't [stop Medicare] and 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."

Of course it's not just Medicare.

Conservatives have emitted terrifying alarums about every new idea from the discovery of fire to the passage of the Social Security program.
Time after time after time, they are proved to be brain-dead wrong.
But they can always find a new crop of weak minds to peddle their crap to.

Don't string up those telegraph wires! It'll burn down the whole town!
Indoor plumbing?? We'll all die of disease!
Inoculation?? These crazy "doctors" will kill us all!
If man were meant to fly...