Remember the summer of rage that tried to stop Obamacare back in 2009?

Remember the panic-stricken public meetings where congressmen were shouted down by angry and terrified constituents? Remember the fear about “death panels” and the “government takeover of health care” and the way Obamacare would sound the death knell for personal freedom and the American way of life?

Charles Koch, the tea-party billionaire who helped finance it all, as good as admits in his new book that it was a load of crap.

In “Good Profit,” his new management guide and libertarian political manifesto, Koch laments the rise of collectivism and socialism and holds out New Zealand, Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong as the models of economic freedom that the rest of us should follow instead.

What he somehow forgets to mention? All four of those libertarian paradises have universal health-care systems that are as “socialized” as Obamacare or more so.

Oops.

“ The real menace to our democracy is simple stupidity. ”

In other words, Koch — the so-called Wallet of the Tea Party and a devotee of extreme anarcho-capitalism — is saying that universal health care is compatible with economic and personal freedom after all.

So much for that “government takeover.”

Doesn’t it just warm your heart to look back at all that Astroturf hysteria back in 2009, when ordinary John and Jane Does were warned that universal health care would lead to fascism and the elderly were terrified with talk that Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank were plotting to have them put down?

Good times.

Koch is not a moderate figure like Mitt Romney, either. This is a man who idolizes novelist Ayn Rand and Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the heroes of the libertarian right. He has been a powerful and influential figure in financing right-wing economic thinking since the 1970s.

Also read:A frustrated Koch brother decides it’s time to ‘spout off’

“Good Profit” is a very political book. In it, Koch makes the case for libertarianism again and again. “Free societies, which are based on respect for what people value, enjoy the greatest prosperity,” he writes. And he singles out the four overseas countries mentioned as his shining examples of how societies should be run.

“Prosperous countries such as New Zealand and Switzerland, while not perfect, secure individual rights — including property rights — for all,” he writes. Hong Kong and Singapore are even better when it comes to economic freedom. They “offer people the greatest economic freedom compared to all the other countries in the world,” he writes, though he adds that they are less good on social and political freedom.

Nowhere does he tell his readers that Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland and New Zealand manage to combine all this freedom with universal health care through “socialized medicine.”

Naturally the structures vary. Switzerland, for example, has a system that is basically a model for Obamacare. Everyone is required by law to take out private health insurance, which is regulated by the government and subsidized for those who can’t easily afford it. In Singapore, the compulsory insurance system is public. Hong Kong and New Zealand provide universal coverage through public health-care systems. In all four countries, health-care costs and provisions are heavily regulated.

Yet, miraculously, freedom hasn’t merely survived this assault in those four countries — it has prospered. Even according to one of the Koch brothers.

The depressing thing about this is that it is yet another illustration of the real menace to our democracy these days. It’s neither the rich nor the poor, conservatives nor liberals nor communists, tycoons, unions or any form of “ism” you care to mention.

It’s simple stupidity. People who can’t be bothered to think, ask questions or do their homework. People who are happy to let other people do their thinking for them, go along with the crowd, and get their half-baked ideas reinforced on Twitter and cable TV. That goes for right-wing stupidity, left-wing stupidity and every other kind of stupidity.

The stupid will be the patsies of the cynical. Always have, always will. But you don’t always catch the cynical admitting it.