Louie Gohmert: “In the summer of 1973, it was a real honor for me to be selected to go on an exchange program. Of course I had to borrow…”

“In the summer of 1973, it was a real honor for me to be selected to go on an exchange program. Of course I had to borrow the money to go and had to pay that back by working hard to take care of the loan, but I went on an exchange program to the Soviet Union, 1973, that summer. It was quite an eye-opener for me. Despite how wonderful the country was made to sound and how great it was that the government, they proclaimed, was the safety net for everybody in the country, they were proclaiming because the government was in charge of everything and in charge of everybody's business, there was 100 percent employment. They talked about how wonderful their socialized medicine was. There were eight Americans on this program that were allowed into the Soviet Union that summer, and we all had very different backgrounds, had different political views. There were a lot of big hearts in the group on both ends of the political spectrum. But, for me, a kid growing up in east Texas, it was an extraordinary education. Because even though people talked about how wonderful it was to have socialized medicine, everybody had a safety net because the government was the safety net, that country's economic system was rotting from within. I went to a medical school. It reminded me of pictures of American medical schools from 40 to 50 years before. We went to an economic exhibition, kind of like a world's fair in Moscow, at one point.…”