In the buildup to the 2012 election, conservatives fretted about nominee Mitt Romney. Like the two Bushes before him, he felt the looming shadow of Ronald Reagan at his back.
Reagan biographer Lou Cannon said "it's (hard) to make a Reagan out of Mitt Romney." The comparisons will be reset for 2016 as Reagan's image stubbornly keeps a hold on many Republican minds. But which Ronald Reagan?
For conservatives, the epitome of Reagan comes through in "the speech." This statement of political principles served as the platform for conservative Republicans for the next three generations. Ostensibly crafted to support Barry Goldwater, Reagan made the ideals his own. They carried him to the California governor's mansion and eventually the White House.
Conservatives don't merely love the text, but also the strident and confident tone, quite unlike the rest of the GOP. It exuded confidence in the future. The delivery also convinced many conservatives that Reagan then and for all time was chiseling out conservative commandments in stone. Somehow, he evolved after his death into a grim sentinel guarding against the idea of deal-making or compromise, hence the negative comparisons with Mitt Romney.
But is this fair?
Both men governed states with electorates to the left of themselves. Reagan led a state determined to forge ahead on abortion, and he had to compromise with the tide of history. Was it the right thing to do? Maybe not. Would the deal have been worse without his part? You bet. Reagan also allowed passage of what Cannon described as "mammoth tax increases."
Romney had the same dilemma with Massachusetts, a state determined to get public health care. Romney crafted a plan that satisfied voters and worked much better than the nationally touted Obamacare. In fact, Obama's law wrecked Romney's design in his own state.
Between the governorship and the presidency, Reagan forged links with decidedly unconservative figures. He reached out to the Rockefeller wing of the party during the 1970s to gain support. In 1976, thinking himself on the cusp of upsetting incumbent President Gerald Ford in the primary, Reagan considered Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as a running mate. Schweiker had fully backed labor unions during his tenure (tough to see how he could not in 1970s Pennsylvania and win elections.) In a conversation with Schweiker, Reagan admitted "I am not a knee jerk conservative."
Tax increases, compromising with abortion, and saying "I am not a knee jerk conservative" would have doomed Reagan among post Reagan conservatives. Romney's "moderation" actually looks farther to the right of Reagan in the late 1970s.
Romney likely saw himself as a disciple of Reagan too, not the firebrand of 1964 or the candidate trying to navigate a diverse GOP ocean in the mid 1970s. President Reagan likely looked much like aspiring president Romney. The Reagan of the 1980s told advisers that he would rather get 75 percent of what he wanted than drive his wagon off the cliff all banners flying. He worked with a hostile Democratic House of Representatives to hammer through a tax reform bill. Conservatives of the 1980s were even shocked. West Virginia congressman Mick Staton went so far as to write the president a letter of complaint, wondering if he had lost his way.
Staunch conservatives see themselves as disciples of Reagan. And in a way, they are right. But moderates are also right when they claim the same mantle. No great man remains the same as he grows and changes. Reagan did adhere to the same principles, but understood as he gained tangible leadership experience that some success was better than all or nothing.
In 2012, the arguments about the GOP nominee often made the perfect the enemy of the good. All too often, that "perfect" was represented by a Ronald Reagan that never existed, a Reagan image that cobbled together the best parts of 25 years of politics while conveniently ignoring other important attributes.
As we approach 2016, it is time to choose a candidate from this century. Reagan was great in the same fashion as Lincoln and Washington, and also like them, not an option today.
Showing posts with label Ronald Reagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ronald Reagan. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Thursday, May 1, 2014
One of Humanity's Highest Honors For One of Its Greatest Individuals
Stalin once joked "how many divisions has the pope" in response to a henchman reporting papal opposition to him. The evil empire he built, however, came to ruin partly due to the efforts of the Papacy. Last Sunday, Pope Francis canonized two former popes, John XXII and John Paul II, also known as "the Great."
Not often can a 2,000 year old institution say that one of its greatest leaders governed in the living memory of most here on earth. St. Leo I the Great met the terrifying Attila and his Huns on the gates of Rome and convinced them not to plunder and slaughter the vulnerable populace within. St. Gregory the Great defined the Church and its role for centuries after in his writings. St. Gregory VII faced down the Holy Roman Emperor, protecting the power of his office, but had to flee Rome at the end of his life, his last words being "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile."
Other popes led the Church through periods of modernization, such as the Catholic Reformation and the Second Vatican Council (under the tutelage of St. John XXII.) But not since the Middle Ages has a pope had an impact quite like St. John Paul II the Great.
He was born Karol Josef Wojtyla in Poland in 1920. At 19, he saw German tanks and Soviet Red Army ranks cleave into his fiercely proud country. He studied in secret for the priesthood under the Archbishop of Krakow during the war, learning both love for humanity and the desire to oppose unholy totalitarianism.
Poland during the Cold War occupied an unstable place in the Soviet Eastern European empire. They did not forget its occasional and bloody uprisings under the Czar in the 1800s. Leaders feared the latent strength of its people, who waged a destructive guerrilla war against German occupation. Poland, therefore, got a little more latitude than other countries.
Poland's Catholic Church never cracked under the pressure of the secret police. Unlike many other countries, Catholicism was seen as tantamount to patriotism. Church leaders fought to remain independent and true to the people and the Word as much as possible without bringing retribution. By 1964, he rose to become Archbishop of Krakow. In the meantime, he had served as a bishop and contributed heavily to the reforms undertaken at the Second Vatican Council.
Soviet leaders and intelligence opened psychological operations against Wojtyla in 1971. They noted that "without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People's Republic have functioned." By the mid 70s, Polish prosecutors concluded that his sermons could earn him prosecution and a sentence of one to 10 years. The respect of the Polish people and his international reputation saved him from anything but impotent outrage.
The College of Cardinals elected him as pope in 1978. He took the name of his predecessor who had died unexpectedly soon after his own accession. John Paul II served as a direct statement by the Roman Catholic Church at a point in the Cold War when western resolve seemed to flag. He was the first Pole ever chosen and the first non Italian in centuries.
Within a few years, the world saw the rise of three leaders, St. John Paul II the Great, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and President Ronald Reagan, destined to transform the world.
Each of the three were idealists at heart. Thatcher envisioned that a free market could restore Britain to its former economic glory. She and Reagan both believed in the spiritual power of freedom to inspire those living in tyranny. An entirely free world could be an entirely peaceful world. The pope shared these dreams, as well as Reagan's very deep personal faith in a God that wanted His people to live in freedom.
When a Pole became pope, the Soviet empire's days were numbered, although no one knew it then. Poland's keystone position in the prison of nations served as the flaw. Even the Polish government by the late 1970s gave up on Marxism-Leninism, looking for western credit to create semi-free trade. This debt scheme collapsed at about the same time as Polish workers started to rebel.
Polish shipworkers had tired of working in dangerous conditions for low pay so they did what many Westerners had done, form a trade union. In a free society, this happens without calamity. In a state supposedly dedicated to the workers, it struck at the heart of why Communist authoritarianism was legitimized. If a peoples' republic is not a workers' state, how can it justify tyranny. Walesa's union soon grew into a political party, Solidarity.
Communist bosses in Moscow and Warsaw celebrated Wojtyla's vacating his seat in Poland. They foresaw that the "Catholic Church will now make greater efforts to consolidate its position and increase its role in the social and political life of the country." But they sorely underestimated what was to come.
After the election of Reagan, Vatican ties with the United States warmed. An official diplomatic exchange took place for the first time in many years. Vatican and US intelligence shared information on happenings behind the Iron Curtain. Money came from the CIA through the Vatican to boost Walesa's Solidarity and other groups.
The Pope himself remained the prime mover of Polish public opinion. Millions poured into the streets to welcome his return in 1983. Communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski found himself increasingly between the two stools of hard line rulers in Moscow willing to order in tanks to restore power and the enthusiasm of the people. Jaruzelski later remembered that even as an atheist, he found his knees shaking under the table in anticipation of meeting the Pontiff.
St. John Paul II had that effect. Only a generation removed from active anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States, Protestants outnumbered Catholics in overflowing crowds that came to hear him. He balanced a rigorous defense of traditional doctrine with repeated assurances of the love of Jesus Christ for all humanity. The Papacy remained a rock during his tenure as a defense of values such as right to life while never wavering in the ideal of God's grace and mercy.
By the 1990s, freedom had won in Europe. Poland's Communist leaders simply gave in to public pressure, held elections, and peacefully left office. Other regimes fell, some with peace, others in violence. In the end, hundreds of millions ended up living in relatively free societies unafraid of the KGB or its little brothers in occupied states.
The peaceful victory of liberty was the goal of St. John Paul II the Great and his secular partners, Reagan and Thatcher. All three were necessary to the process, all had roles to play.
In the end, the Pope needed no divisions. He helped to defeat the Evil Empire with the love of God; for that he earned the title of "Great."
Not often can a 2,000 year old institution say that one of its greatest leaders governed in the living memory of most here on earth. St. Leo I the Great met the terrifying Attila and his Huns on the gates of Rome and convinced them not to plunder and slaughter the vulnerable populace within. St. Gregory the Great defined the Church and its role for centuries after in his writings. St. Gregory VII faced down the Holy Roman Emperor, protecting the power of his office, but had to flee Rome at the end of his life, his last words being "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile."
Other popes led the Church through periods of modernization, such as the Catholic Reformation and the Second Vatican Council (under the tutelage of St. John XXII.) But not since the Middle Ages has a pope had an impact quite like St. John Paul II the Great.
He was born Karol Josef Wojtyla in Poland in 1920. At 19, he saw German tanks and Soviet Red Army ranks cleave into his fiercely proud country. He studied in secret for the priesthood under the Archbishop of Krakow during the war, learning both love for humanity and the desire to oppose unholy totalitarianism.
Poland during the Cold War occupied an unstable place in the Soviet Eastern European empire. They did not forget its occasional and bloody uprisings under the Czar in the 1800s. Leaders feared the latent strength of its people, who waged a destructive guerrilla war against German occupation. Poland, therefore, got a little more latitude than other countries.
Poland's Catholic Church never cracked under the pressure of the secret police. Unlike many other countries, Catholicism was seen as tantamount to patriotism. Church leaders fought to remain independent and true to the people and the Word as much as possible without bringing retribution. By 1964, he rose to become Archbishop of Krakow. In the meantime, he had served as a bishop and contributed heavily to the reforms undertaken at the Second Vatican Council.
Soviet leaders and intelligence opened psychological operations against Wojtyla in 1971. They noted that "without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People's Republic have functioned." By the mid 70s, Polish prosecutors concluded that his sermons could earn him prosecution and a sentence of one to 10 years. The respect of the Polish people and his international reputation saved him from anything but impotent outrage.
The College of Cardinals elected him as pope in 1978. He took the name of his predecessor who had died unexpectedly soon after his own accession. John Paul II served as a direct statement by the Roman Catholic Church at a point in the Cold War when western resolve seemed to flag. He was the first Pole ever chosen and the first non Italian in centuries.
Within a few years, the world saw the rise of three leaders, St. John Paul II the Great, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and President Ronald Reagan, destined to transform the world.
Each of the three were idealists at heart. Thatcher envisioned that a free market could restore Britain to its former economic glory. She and Reagan both believed in the spiritual power of freedom to inspire those living in tyranny. An entirely free world could be an entirely peaceful world. The pope shared these dreams, as well as Reagan's very deep personal faith in a God that wanted His people to live in freedom.
When a Pole became pope, the Soviet empire's days were numbered, although no one knew it then. Poland's keystone position in the prison of nations served as the flaw. Even the Polish government by the late 1970s gave up on Marxism-Leninism, looking for western credit to create semi-free trade. This debt scheme collapsed at about the same time as Polish workers started to rebel.
Polish shipworkers had tired of working in dangerous conditions for low pay so they did what many Westerners had done, form a trade union. In a free society, this happens without calamity. In a state supposedly dedicated to the workers, it struck at the heart of why Communist authoritarianism was legitimized. If a peoples' republic is not a workers' state, how can it justify tyranny. Walesa's union soon grew into a political party, Solidarity.
Communist bosses in Moscow and Warsaw celebrated Wojtyla's vacating his seat in Poland. They foresaw that the "Catholic Church will now make greater efforts to consolidate its position and increase its role in the social and political life of the country." But they sorely underestimated what was to come.
After the election of Reagan, Vatican ties with the United States warmed. An official diplomatic exchange took place for the first time in many years. Vatican and US intelligence shared information on happenings behind the Iron Curtain. Money came from the CIA through the Vatican to boost Walesa's Solidarity and other groups.
The Pope himself remained the prime mover of Polish public opinion. Millions poured into the streets to welcome his return in 1983. Communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski found himself increasingly between the two stools of hard line rulers in Moscow willing to order in tanks to restore power and the enthusiasm of the people. Jaruzelski later remembered that even as an atheist, he found his knees shaking under the table in anticipation of meeting the Pontiff.
St. John Paul II had that effect. Only a generation removed from active anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States, Protestants outnumbered Catholics in overflowing crowds that came to hear him. He balanced a rigorous defense of traditional doctrine with repeated assurances of the love of Jesus Christ for all humanity. The Papacy remained a rock during his tenure as a defense of values such as right to life while never wavering in the ideal of God's grace and mercy.
By the 1990s, freedom had won in Europe. Poland's Communist leaders simply gave in to public pressure, held elections, and peacefully left office. Other regimes fell, some with peace, others in violence. In the end, hundreds of millions ended up living in relatively free societies unafraid of the KGB or its little brothers in occupied states.
The peaceful victory of liberty was the goal of St. John Paul II the Great and his secular partners, Reagan and Thatcher. All three were necessary to the process, all had roles to play.
In the end, the Pope needed no divisions. He helped to defeat the Evil Empire with the love of God; for that he earned the title of "Great."
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Unleashing the Dogs of War . . . Or At Least A Limited Strike
The worst kept secret on the planet right now is that the United States, and perhaps other allies as well, will launch some sort of attack on Syria in the near future.
Last summer, Obama declared that one of his "red lines" was the use of weapons of mass destruction. Last week, someone in the Assad "administration" apparently used them to kill, among others, many hundreds of civilians.
US intelligence sources cite a strange intercepted phone call within the Syrian government camp as proof. A Syrian defense official demanded an explanation for why chemical weapons were launched. If one was forthcoming, the rationale has not yet been released.
This raises questions about the Syrian government. Was the attack the work of a rogue officer? Was it a direct order from the highest levels of government? Is the Syrian government even a cohesive unit anymore?
In any event, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron seem to agree that a response must occur.
Cameron plans to consult with Parliament. At this time, however, Obama seems to have no plans to request authorization from Congress. Although some congressional Republicans have offered muted support, Senator Rand Paul (Ky.) claimed that Syrian events had "no clear national security connection" to the United States. Paul did not rule out action, but asked that Obama consult with Congress meaningfully before acting.
In this case, rushing to action within a few days does not seem absolutely necessary. The repulsiveness of the attack is not likely to wear out. Indeed the United Nations investigators will undoubtedly either uncover more evidence and details that maintain world disgust, or Syrian officials will block them entirely. The UN has requested four days, which does not seem unreasonable. President George W. Bush gave them much longer before launching war against Iraq.
Syria presents US policy makers considerable trouble. The rebel targets of government chemical weapons have shown themselves no less murderous than Assad's thugs. Islamicist rebels have slaughtered Roman Catholic clergy among many other innocents during their own reign of terror.
President Bush had some "good guys" to work with when he overturned Saddam Hussein's thugocracy. Syria seems to have few or no credible leaders who could make a peaceful republic work.
This limits Obama's options. Any Iraq style invasion would require a much more powerful force prepared to stay in place for much longer. Nation building would by necessity look more like colonization.
Any boots on the ground would likely end badly for the United States. In the mid 1980s, President Reagan deployed Marines to serve as part of a peacekeeping unit to try and bring stability to Lebanon. Terrorists killed over 200. After a few good-bye blasts from the USS New Jersey, American forces skedaddled.
The various Lebanese factions had no desire to play nice just because American and European soldiers showed up. They continued killing each other and blowing up heaps of rubble until they exhausted their will to fight. Lebanon has remained relatively peaceable ever since.
So ground based combat forces will not work.
That leaves air strikes and/or covert operations. The CIA does need to infiltrate Syria. To make reasonable decisions, American leaders need to have knowledge of what is going on and who makes it happen. It needs to monitor individuals and groups as they refine terror techniques. Covert teams can also find locations of important sites in case stronger military action is required.
Air strikes would have to be very precise and specific. Former Representative and anti-war crusader Dennis Kucinich noted that air strikes by American planes would make them Al Qaeda's air force. Indiscriminate targeting of Syrian government military forces would help clear the road for an even worse regime. Conversely, firing a couple of Tomahawk missiles in the general direction of Assad makes American power look downright petty and even silly.
Take the time to identify chemical weapons facilities. Only target them. Use weapons capable of doing the job, like daisy cutters. Cruise missiles may not deliver enough punch. This will achieve a limited goal and curb WMD attacks in the future without overly involving the US or using military action as a public relations stunt.
Obama must also prepare to stand by Israel. Attacks on Syria may provoke a response against Israel. Specific tactical actions may be necessary against any force deployed to strike Israel. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how effectively Syria could strike Israel while struggling in its own civil war.
Obama must make wise decisions here, stick by them, and articulate explanations. He must have the specific goal of curbing WMD usage while rebuilding respect for American power. If he covers his bases with Congress and the United Nations, this could help reconstruct respect for US foreign policy that has fallen greatly since Bush left office.
Many unmarked cliffs and chasms loom in the road ahead. Obama will have to tread carefully as he acts.
Last summer, Obama declared that one of his "red lines" was the use of weapons of mass destruction. Last week, someone in the Assad "administration" apparently used them to kill, among others, many hundreds of civilians.
US intelligence sources cite a strange intercepted phone call within the Syrian government camp as proof. A Syrian defense official demanded an explanation for why chemical weapons were launched. If one was forthcoming, the rationale has not yet been released.
This raises questions about the Syrian government. Was the attack the work of a rogue officer? Was it a direct order from the highest levels of government? Is the Syrian government even a cohesive unit anymore?
In any event, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron seem to agree that a response must occur.
Cameron plans to consult with Parliament. At this time, however, Obama seems to have no plans to request authorization from Congress. Although some congressional Republicans have offered muted support, Senator Rand Paul (Ky.) claimed that Syrian events had "no clear national security connection" to the United States. Paul did not rule out action, but asked that Obama consult with Congress meaningfully before acting.
In this case, rushing to action within a few days does not seem absolutely necessary. The repulsiveness of the attack is not likely to wear out. Indeed the United Nations investigators will undoubtedly either uncover more evidence and details that maintain world disgust, or Syrian officials will block them entirely. The UN has requested four days, which does not seem unreasonable. President George W. Bush gave them much longer before launching war against Iraq.
Syria presents US policy makers considerable trouble. The rebel targets of government chemical weapons have shown themselves no less murderous than Assad's thugs. Islamicist rebels have slaughtered Roman Catholic clergy among many other innocents during their own reign of terror.
President Bush had some "good guys" to work with when he overturned Saddam Hussein's thugocracy. Syria seems to have few or no credible leaders who could make a peaceful republic work.
This limits Obama's options. Any Iraq style invasion would require a much more powerful force prepared to stay in place for much longer. Nation building would by necessity look more like colonization.
Any boots on the ground would likely end badly for the United States. In the mid 1980s, President Reagan deployed Marines to serve as part of a peacekeeping unit to try and bring stability to Lebanon. Terrorists killed over 200. After a few good-bye blasts from the USS New Jersey, American forces skedaddled.
The various Lebanese factions had no desire to play nice just because American and European soldiers showed up. They continued killing each other and blowing up heaps of rubble until they exhausted their will to fight. Lebanon has remained relatively peaceable ever since.
So ground based combat forces will not work.
That leaves air strikes and/or covert operations. The CIA does need to infiltrate Syria. To make reasonable decisions, American leaders need to have knowledge of what is going on and who makes it happen. It needs to monitor individuals and groups as they refine terror techniques. Covert teams can also find locations of important sites in case stronger military action is required.
Air strikes would have to be very precise and specific. Former Representative and anti-war crusader Dennis Kucinich noted that air strikes by American planes would make them Al Qaeda's air force. Indiscriminate targeting of Syrian government military forces would help clear the road for an even worse regime. Conversely, firing a couple of Tomahawk missiles in the general direction of Assad makes American power look downright petty and even silly.
Take the time to identify chemical weapons facilities. Only target them. Use weapons capable of doing the job, like daisy cutters. Cruise missiles may not deliver enough punch. This will achieve a limited goal and curb WMD attacks in the future without overly involving the US or using military action as a public relations stunt.
Obama must also prepare to stand by Israel. Attacks on Syria may provoke a response against Israel. Specific tactical actions may be necessary against any force deployed to strike Israel. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how effectively Syria could strike Israel while struggling in its own civil war.
Obama must make wise decisions here, stick by them, and articulate explanations. He must have the specific goal of curbing WMD usage while rebuilding respect for American power. If he covers his bases with Congress and the United Nations, this could help reconstruct respect for US foreign policy that has fallen greatly since Bush left office.
Many unmarked cliffs and chasms loom in the road ahead. Obama will have to tread carefully as he acts.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Potomac Highlands Conservative Video: "A Time For Choosing" AKA "The Speech" by Ronald Reagan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBswFfh6AY
Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used "We've never had it so good."
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We have raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations in the world. We have $15 billion in gold in our treasury--we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are $27.3 billion, and we have just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are! I had someplace to escape to." In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the "Great Society," or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a "greater government activity in the affairs of the people." But they have been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves--and all of the things that I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say "the cold war will end through acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism." Another voice says that the profit motive has become outmoded, it must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state; or our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century. Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the president as our moral teacher and our leader, and he said he is hobbled in his task by the restrictions in power imposed on him by this antiquated document. He must be freed so that he can do for us what he knows is best. And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government." Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the free man and woman of this country--as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government"--this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
Now, we have no better example of this than the government's involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85% of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21% increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming is regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we have spent $43 in feed grain program for every bushel of corn we don't grow.
Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater as President would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he will find out that we have had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He will also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress an extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He will find that they have also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.
At the same time, there has been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There is now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.
Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but who are farmers to know what is best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.
Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights are so diluted that public interest is almost anything that a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes for the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of the land." The President tells us he is now going to start building public housing units in the thousands where heretofore we have only built them in the hundreds. But FHA and the Veterans Administration tell us that they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosures. For three decades, we have sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency. They have just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over $30 million on deposit in personal savings in their banks. When the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed.
We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they are going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer and they've had almost 30 years of it, shouldn't we expect government to almost read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater, the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
So now we declare "war on poverty," or "you, too, can be a Bobby Baker!" Now, do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending...one more program to the 30-odd we have--and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs--do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain that there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps, and we are going to put our young people in camps, but again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we are going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person that we help $4,700 a year! We can send them to Harvard for $2,700! Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who had come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning $250 a month. She wanted a divorce so that she could get an $80 raise. She is eligible for $330 a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who had already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are always "against" things, never "for" anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so. We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those who depend on them for livelihood. They have called it insurance to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified that it was a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is $298 billion in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble! And they are doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary...his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee $220 a month at age 65. The government promises $127. He could live it up until he is 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now, are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis so that people who do require those payments will find that they can get them when they are due...that the cupboard isn't bare? Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
At the same time, can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provisions for the non-earning years? Should we allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under these programs, which we cannot do? I think we are for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program was now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road.
In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate planned inflation so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth, and not 45 cents' worth?
I think we are for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we are against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among the nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I think we are against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in Soviet colonies in the satellite nation.
I think we are for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107. We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a $2 million yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenyan government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought $7 billion worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth. Federal employees number 2.5 million, and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work force is employed by the government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury, and they can seize and sell his property in auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier overplanted his rice allotment. The government obtained a $17,000 judgment, and a U.S. marshal sold his 950-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work. Last February 19 at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-time candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States." I think that's exactly what he will do.
As a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration. Back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his party was taking the part of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his party, and he never returned to the day he died, because to this day, the leadership of that party has been taking that party, that honorable party, down the road in the image of the labor socialist party of England. Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? Such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men...that we are to choose just between two personalities.
Well, what of this man that they would destroy? And in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear. Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well, I have been privileged to know him "when." I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I have never known a man in my life I believe so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.
This is a man who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work. He provided nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by floods from the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas, and he said that there were a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. Then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, "Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such," and they went down there, and there was this fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in the weeks before Christmas, all day long, he would load up the plane, fly to Arizona, fly them to their homes, then fly back over to get another load.
During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, "There aren't many left who care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care." This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, "There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life upon that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start." This is not a man who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all of the other problems I have discussed academic, unless we realize that we are in a war that must be won.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer--not an easy answer--but simple.
If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.
Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
Thank you very much.
Historical Documents
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Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used "We've never had it so good."
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We have raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations in the world. We have $15 billion in gold in our treasury--we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are $27.3 billion, and we have just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are! I had someplace to escape to." In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the "Great Society," or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a "greater government activity in the affairs of the people." But they have been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves--and all of the things that I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say "the cold war will end through acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism." Another voice says that the profit motive has become outmoded, it must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state; or our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century. Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the president as our moral teacher and our leader, and he said he is hobbled in his task by the restrictions in power imposed on him by this antiquated document. He must be freed so that he can do for us what he knows is best. And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government." Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the free man and woman of this country--as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government"--this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
Now, we have no better example of this than the government's involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85% of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21% increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming is regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we have spent $43 in feed grain program for every bushel of corn we don't grow.
Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater as President would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he will find out that we have had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He will also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress an extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He will find that they have also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.
At the same time, there has been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There is now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.
Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but who are farmers to know what is best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.
Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights are so diluted that public interest is almost anything that a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes for the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of the land." The President tells us he is now going to start building public housing units in the thousands where heretofore we have only built them in the hundreds. But FHA and the Veterans Administration tell us that they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosures. For three decades, we have sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency. They have just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over $30 million on deposit in personal savings in their banks. When the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed.
We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they are going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer and they've had almost 30 years of it, shouldn't we expect government to almost read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater, the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
So now we declare "war on poverty," or "you, too, can be a Bobby Baker!" Now, do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending...one more program to the 30-odd we have--and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs--do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain that there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps, and we are going to put our young people in camps, but again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we are going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person that we help $4,700 a year! We can send them to Harvard for $2,700! Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who had come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning $250 a month. She wanted a divorce so that she could get an $80 raise. She is eligible for $330 a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who had already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are always "against" things, never "for" anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so. We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those who depend on them for livelihood. They have called it insurance to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified that it was a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is $298 billion in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble! And they are doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary...his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee $220 a month at age 65. The government promises $127. He could live it up until he is 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now, are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis so that people who do require those payments will find that they can get them when they are due...that the cupboard isn't bare? Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
At the same time, can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provisions for the non-earning years? Should we allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under these programs, which we cannot do? I think we are for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program was now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road.
In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate planned inflation so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth, and not 45 cents' worth?
I think we are for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we are against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among the nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I think we are against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in Soviet colonies in the satellite nation.
I think we are for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107. We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a $2 million yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenyan government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought $7 billion worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth. Federal employees number 2.5 million, and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work force is employed by the government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury, and they can seize and sell his property in auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier overplanted his rice allotment. The government obtained a $17,000 judgment, and a U.S. marshal sold his 950-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work. Last February 19 at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-time candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States." I think that's exactly what he will do.
As a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration. Back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his party was taking the part of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his party, and he never returned to the day he died, because to this day, the leadership of that party has been taking that party, that honorable party, down the road in the image of the labor socialist party of England. Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? Such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men...that we are to choose just between two personalities.
Well, what of this man that they would destroy? And in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear. Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well, I have been privileged to know him "when." I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I have never known a man in my life I believe so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.
This is a man who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work. He provided nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by floods from the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas, and he said that there were a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. Then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, "Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such," and they went down there, and there was this fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in the weeks before Christmas, all day long, he would load up the plane, fly to Arizona, fly them to their homes, then fly back over to get another load.
During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, "There aren't many left who care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care." This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, "There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life upon that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start." This is not a man who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all of the other problems I have discussed academic, unless we realize that we are in a war that must be won.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer--not an easy answer--but simple.
If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.
Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
Thank you very much.
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Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Obama Insults Poland
Ronald Reagan in 1981 said of Poland and its people:"The Polish nation, speaking through Solidarity, has provided one of the brightest, bravest moments of modern history. The people of Poland are giving us an imperishable example of courage and devotion to the values of freedom in the face of relentless opposition. Left to themselves, the Polish people would enjoy a new birth of freedom. But there are those who oppose the idea of freedom, who are intolerant of national independence, and hostile to the European values of democracy and the rule of law.
"Two Decembers ago, freedom was lost in Afghanistan; this Christmas, it’s at stake in Poland. But the torch of liberty is hot. It warms those who hold it high. It burns those who try to extinguish it."
Poland has becoem one of our strongest friends and supporters since the fall of Communism in part to to words and deeds of Ronald Reagan, a true president.
This week Barack Obama, currently occupying a house where heroes once lived, could not tear himself away from a a game of golf to ride over to the Polish Embassy to pay respects for their fallen president. Obama's non attendance at the actual funeral in Poland was understandable given that an engine destroying cloud of volcanic ash hovered over Europe. What prevented him from stepping into a car and riding to pay his respects to Poland's representatives in the United States?
Again, this is what you get from a minor league man in a major league role. In other news, Libyan dictator Moammar Qadaffi praised Obama's leadership . . .
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Case For Limited Government Proved Better Through Actions Than Words
We can talk all we want about the virtues of limited government, but actions speak louder than words. We can debate until the cows come home that cuts in spending and taxes help the economy better than waste, but the public must see ideas in action usually to believe them. We who believe in free markets and small government may someday get on our knees regularly and thank the Almighty for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.
Actions speak louder than words. President Bush, regrettably, all too often resorted to the easy panacaea of government action rather than the difficult choice of cutting government binds on the economy, allowing it to float to equilibrium. President Bush knew security and he believed in tax cuts, but he did not eliminate Clinton era intrusions into the free market. Politically this is hard to blame and too much criticism becomes Monday morning quarterbacking. George W. Bush was a good president, but not a visionary.
Our times require a visionary who believes in pushing back hard against the creeping socialism of the left. It is not enough to halt Obama and Pelosi's plans in their tracks. We must roll them back. However the more zealous out there must sometimes accept a 3/4 victory here and there rather than what we want in its entirety. Reagan was the most principled president of the last several decades, but his favorite phrase on compromise was that he'd rather get some of what he wanted than "fly off the cliff with all banners fluttering."
That being said, Republicans must stand for something in 2010, or the voters will fall for anything the Democrats ultimately say. We must stand for real restictions on taxation. We must stand for real restrictions on executive branch power and the return of state sovereignty. We must stand for real cuts in spending, not just limiting the yearly growth of spending. We must present a plan that cuts our debt while also cutting taxes. That means massive reductions in government spending across the board. It means that highways will have to go uncompleted for awhile, that military bases overseas may have to be phased out, that certain programs that make people feel good will have to go by the wayside. It definitely means that every bit of our budget needs to go through analysis of whether or not we actually need it. Our system has grown sick, the symptoms include debt, unemployment, and lack of prestige. The cure will be painful, but will bring us back to full health and vitality in a few years.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
A Time For Choosing . . .
This takes some time. If you don't have a few minures to spare, come back to it later on. Ronald Reagan gave this speech to support the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. He had spoken for years on the necessity of free markets and limited government. His experience with the Democratic Party's left wing and paying 94% of his income in taxes convinced this son of a New Deal official that the GOP had the better vision for America.
For Reagan it was not just party, but also principle that pushed him forward. He had a vision of American greatness that we have not yet lost. It will take work to get our America back. So take some time, read these powerful words, and reflect on what we all need to do to reassert our rights and retake the United States of America in the name of our Founding Fathers and our children.
Ronald Reagan
A Time for Choosing (aka "The Speech")
Air date 27 October 1964, Los Angeles, CA
Program Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan:
Reagan: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, "We've never had it so good."
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the "Great Society," or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they've been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, "The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism." Another voice says, "The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state." Or, "Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century." Senator Fulbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as "our moral teacher and our leader," and he says he is "hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document." He must "be freed," so that he "can do for us" what he knows "is best." And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government."
Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government" -- this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
Now, we have no better example of this than government's involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85% of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21% increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming -- that's regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we've spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don't grow.
Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he'll find out that we've had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He'll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He'll find that they've also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.
At the same time, there's been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There's now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.
Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but how -- who are farmers to know what's best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.
Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of the land." The President tells us he's now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore we've only built them in the hundreds. But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, we've sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency.
They've just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over 30 million dollars on deposit in personal savings in their banks. And when the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed.
We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer -- and they've had almost 30 years of it -- shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we're told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We're spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we'd be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
Now -- so now we declare "war on poverty," or "You, too, can be a Bobby Baker." Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have -- and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs -- do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We're now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps [Civilian Conservation Corps], and we're going to put our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we're going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who'd come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always "against" things -- we're never "for" anything.
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
Now -- we're for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary -- his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're due -- that the cupboard isn't bare?
Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
At the same time, can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think we're for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road.
In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate, planned inflation, so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth, and not 45 cents worth?
I think we're for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we're against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I think we're against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.
I think we're for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought 7 billion dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So, governments' programs, once launched, never disappear.
Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.
Federal employees -- federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work force employed by government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.
Last February 19th at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States." I think that's exactly what he will do.
But as a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration, because back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his Party, and he never returned til the day he died -- because to this day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that honorable Party, down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party of England.
Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men -- that we're to choose just between two personalities.
Well what of this man that they would destroy -- and in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear? Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well I've been privileged to know him "when." I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I've never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.
This is a man who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, "Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such," and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he'd load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.
During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, "There aren't many left who care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care." This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, "There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start." This is not a man who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I've discussed academic, unless we realize we're in a war that must be won.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender.
Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face -- that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand -- the ultimatum. And what then -- when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this -- this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits -- not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
Thank you very much.
For Reagan it was not just party, but also principle that pushed him forward. He had a vision of American greatness that we have not yet lost. It will take work to get our America back. So take some time, read these powerful words, and reflect on what we all need to do to reassert our rights and retake the United States of America in the name of our Founding Fathers and our children.
Ronald Reagan
A Time for Choosing (aka "The Speech")
Air date 27 October 1964, Los Angeles, CA
Program Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan:
Reagan: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, "We've never had it so good."
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the "Great Society," or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they've been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, "The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism." Another voice says, "The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state." Or, "Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century." Senator Fulbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as "our moral teacher and our leader," and he says he is "hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document." He must "be freed," so that he "can do for us" what he knows "is best." And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government."
Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government" -- this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
Now, we have no better example of this than government's involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85% of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21% increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming -- that's regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we've spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don't grow.
Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he'll find out that we've had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He'll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He'll find that they've also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.
At the same time, there's been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There's now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.
Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but how -- who are farmers to know what's best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.
Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of the land." The President tells us he's now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore we've only built them in the hundreds. But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, we've sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency.
They've just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over 30 million dollars on deposit in personal savings in their banks. And when the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed.
We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer -- and they've had almost 30 years of it -- shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we're told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We're spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we'd be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
Now -- so now we declare "war on poverty," or "You, too, can be a Bobby Baker." Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have -- and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs -- do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We're now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps [Civilian Conservation Corps], and we're going to put our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we're going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who'd come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always "against" things -- we're never "for" anything.
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
Now -- we're for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary -- his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're due -- that the cupboard isn't bare?
Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
At the same time, can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think we're for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road.
In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate, planned inflation, so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth, and not 45 cents worth?
I think we're for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we're against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I think we're against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.
I think we're for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought 7 billion dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So, governments' programs, once launched, never disappear.
Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.
Federal employees -- federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work force employed by government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.
Last February 19th at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States." I think that's exactly what he will do.
But as a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration, because back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his Party, and he never returned til the day he died -- because to this day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that honorable Party, down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party of England.
Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men -- that we're to choose just between two personalities.
Well what of this man that they would destroy -- and in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear? Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well I've been privileged to know him "when." I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I've never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.
This is a man who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, "Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such," and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he'd load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.
During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, "There aren't many left who care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care." This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, "There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start." This is not a man who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I've discussed academic, unless we realize we're in a war that must be won.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender.
Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face -- that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand -- the ultimatum. And what then -- when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this -- this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits -- not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
Thank you very much.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Creepy
I remember being accused a few years back of being a 100% backer of President Bush, agreeing with every single thing he ever said or did. My responde was always the same, that I agreed with probably six or seven out of every ten things. I argued that I liked him because I agreed with him most of the time, especially on the big issues such as security. I also really like Ronald Reagan, but when I teach on him in class I criticize the way he handled Lebanon. The way we left that country and handled hostage situations encouraged more terrorism later.No conservative will answer that they agreed with either Bush 100% of the time and very few will say that of Reagan. You are not disloyal to the cause in conservatism for thinking freely.
Contrast that with some of Obama's followers, people who believe that he rules, not governs.
Most people saw the extremely creepy video of a schoolteacher leading children in a song of praise about Obama. Part of it was sung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic! It parroted his campaign messages and other speeches since his inauguration.
Many correctly pointed out that this goes beyond education into simple propaganda. Parents responded with anger at their children being used and then put on You Tube. It reflects the attitude common to fascist, communist, and personal dictatorships. This attitude exalts the Leader over the individual, his will over your judgment. It is way to common for a certain segemtn to adore Obama instead of simply support him.
That is frightening.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
If I Could Go Back In Time . . .
If I Could Go Back In Time to September 2001 (assuming I could not go back prior to 9/12 that is) I would do the following.Knowing what we know now about the idea to assassinate terrorists that never was implemented, and therefore never explained to Congress, but is now used as a political tool against the vice president (probably because he dares to speak against the Obamunists), I think the liberals may be on to something, but not in the way they think. Imagine if I could go back and have President Bush do this.
Speak to the nation Reagan style, from the Oval Office, just as Reagan did when he almost turned Moammar Qaddaffi into a crispy critter. President Bush would be brief and say the following:
"My fellow Americans. Terrorists have brought their fanatical hatred of freedom home to us. We will now take it to them. This is due notice that I am giving to the people and Congress of the United States as well as the world. We are sending out the best trained and equipped men and women on Earth. Their job, to locate every individual connected with the organization that murdered thousands of Americans. For some of you who are our enemies, we will find you swiftly, others it could take years. Trust me, you will be found. When found, you will be killed. It could be a silent bullet, it could be a knife across your neck. One way or another, you will die.
To escape certain death, you must turn yourself in to American authorities and cooperate in full.
Thank you and may God bless the United States of America."
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Gingrich Sounds Like a Man Running For President
While out of town last week, I did something that I almost never do. As I flipped through the channels I saw Newt Gingrich giving a speech in some GOP fundraiser somewhere. I decided to watch for a few minutes to see what he said.
This was not old school Newt. Ten and fifteen years ago Gingrich used a two fisted, in your face style to hammer his point into your brain. He relished confrontation because the Speaker seemed to truly dislike his opposition from time to time. This made him a beloved personality among conservatives, but even those who truly liked and agreed with him saw little in the way of electability.
Two things happened. The Democrats nominated and elected a Marxist. Suddenly a middle of the road candidate seemed much less palatable. Besides, George W. Bush was a middle of the road president and the Democrats hated him anyway. Bush's instinct to act combined with options limited by a left wing Congress laid the groundwork for our current problems with Obama. Republicans more than ever look to a man of strength, experience, and free market principles.
Second, Gingrich mellowed, at least personally. His speech was firey, funny, and to the point. Significantly it lacked the element of anger that at some points in his past characterized him. Gingrich speaks like a statesman, clearly, concisely, forcefully, and at times directly from his mind and heart without even reference to notes. His Teleprompterness, the Maximum Duce could never compete face to face with that.
Gingrich has a vision for this century on a wide variety of fronts. Americans over and over have shown that they believe in his ideas. It only remains to sell himself. His words sound like Reagan's. Now he needs to continue to work that same sense of humor into his speaking to accompany the strong sense of purpose and clear ideas.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Jeb Bush Is Right
Don't get me wrong. I do cherish and respect what President Reagan did for our party and our country. His ideas and his efforts gave America twenty-five years of prosperity. Had Clinton followed his foreign policy example, we may have seen a much more secure America as well.
It's time to move on. It really is.
I am not saying we should forget Ronald Reagan. We never forgot Abraham Lincoln or Dwight Eisenhower. We should do a lot more to remember William McKinley who was a stronger supporter of free markets than the more flamboyant Theodore Roosevelt. However he belongs to history now.
People my age and older will have a hard time with this. We lived through the 1970s and remember the misery. Ronald Reagan raised us from all of that and restored our country's position in the world. But we must remember that millions of voters were not even alive when he was president. To them, he is as unreachable as Lincoln, a picture in a history book instead of a living example. If we continue to venerate Reagan, we risk looking like the old Franklin Roosevelt stalwarts of the not too distant past. Who in West Virginia even in the 80s and 90s did not know at least one person who voted the straight Democratic ticket because of FDR?
The Republican Party must start searching for the next Reagan because America will need some renewing in 2012. Obama has deconstructed much of our economic and diplomatic position in a shockingly short amount of time. Who will be the Republican to inspire this generation? Where will the ideas that wil shape the 21st Century come from? Hopefully we see one emerge soon.
Do not forget the past, but do not let the past blind us to the present or the future.
****************************************************************************
Remember when we said on this blog that Ford Motor Company will not only be fine, but end up in a strong position when this economy shakes out?
Ford just leapt over Toyota to once again seize second place in US auto sales last month. Ford's new midsized Fusion is a hit with consumers and recreates the success enjoyed by that company in the 1990s with the unspectacular, but dependable Taurus.
General (soon to be renamed "Government?") Motors is still the nation's best selling company, but they and Toyota both lost market share to the aggressive and still completely private sector Ford Motor Company.
To be honest I still think GM should be split into two if not three parts. Chevrolet and Cadillac would probably prosper alone.
Kudos to Ford!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Nixonian Foreign Policy and Obama
A couple of days ago, I described Hillary Clinton's foreign policy as being that of Richard Nixon and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that point needed clarification.
Nixon's main achievements came in the field of foreign policy. Lyndon Johnson's tax and spend approach to welfare combined with his mismanagement of the Vietnam War led to a period of American weakness. High inflation, breakdowns of social cohesion, and a declining ability to project power meant that by the late 60s, that weakness was real. Nixon adjusted US policy accordingly. For the first time since World War II, we dealt from a position of weakness rather than one of strength. This required Nixon, more so than other presidents, to engage enemies with despicable domestic records. Mao Tse Dong was the worst of the lot. However, Nixon did this with an overall vision of m,aking our enemies (USSR and China) more afraid of each other than of us. It worked, giving us breathing room before the American Renaissance of Ronald Reagan.
Obama has insisted that we show disrespect to our friends and love to our enemies (who use the opportunity to slap us in the face when they get the chance.) It is the Nixon concept of engaging enemies, without the overall plan of how to use that engagement to secure security. What is most galling is that at the end of 2008 the United States was the most secure and strongest power in the world. Obama's excessive borrowing has placed us at the mercy of our adversaries. His policy of apologizing for every slight, real or imagined, has dissolved the international respect so carefully established by Bush and Rice.
So a point of clarification. I used Nixon to describe Clinton and Obama's policy because liberals believe that Nixon is worse than Hitler and Judas Iscariot rolled into one. However it does use some aspects of Nixon's process without the overall vision or savvy that will lead to an enhanced American security.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Either Naivete, Stupidity, Or A Serious Lack of Concern
In 1959 a newspaper photo was sent over the wires that reaffirmed in the strongest possible way the support of the United States of America for democracy as well as its opposition to oppression and tyranny. Vice President Richard Nixon responded to a debate challenge by Nikita Kruschev with characteristic aggressiveness. The pugnacious Nixon stands with index finger extended into the chest of a suddenly bemused Soviet premier.
Other presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, were credited for boosting the spirits of those fighting tyranny in their own countries. Reagan's challenges reverberated secretly through the gulags while Tibetan freedom protesters in recent years cited American support as a strong source of motivation. You never forgot our position on dictatorship and democracy during these presidencies.
That is what makes Obama's familiarity with Chavez so chilling and foolish at the same time. He plays the picture of a handshake and the two men obviously enjoying each other's company as meaningless. Remember, this is the same person who (along with his wife) could not help but demonstrate contempt over and over for our real allies.
Obama in foreign affairs conducts himself like the stereotypical witless TV dad who has no real connection with the world around him, simply wants to get along with everyone, and try to look "cool" doing it.
Maybe he should stay home and let the adults handle "big boy" issues like America's daily shrinking credibility. Then again, he would just be tempted to foul up the banks and General Motors some more. Or maybe pass another tax on employers.
Does anyone else remember the days when the President of the United States was called "leader of the free world?"
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Count me as someone unconcerned that one of the 9/11 plotters was waterboarded over 180 times. Seems to me it was about 2,000 times too few. I have zero sympathy for this gentleman. The idea that terrorists will treat American or allied prisoners more harshly as a result is ludicrous. They beheaded Daniel Pearl. At least some of the victims of execution were not given clean cuts either. Does it get much more brutal than that? We need to remember who we are dealing with.
Every report on the number of waterboardings done to these people ought to be prefaced by a shot of the towers being hit and coming down.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
We Have Met the Enemy, And It Is the Federal Government
The basic problem driving the economic crisis, at least in the United States, is the mortgage crisis. This was combined with the fuel spike and a few other problems, but generally the housing market crash reverberated throughout the economy.
Some blamed bank mismanagement, but the federal government ponied up money anyway. Banks are the engines of capitalism. If they fail, we have serious problems. But why did they fail?
Last year the media gave us their answer. The simple greed of banks and individuals trying to turn a fast buck. Banks give questionable loans to questionable investors. Middle class greed was blamed; families spending too much on things they don't need. The whole issue became a homily on the evils of capitalism.
If only we had stuck to capitalism! In 1993 the federal government decided to enforce laws that the Reagan and first Bush administrations chose to ignore. These laws required banks to make an effort to find non traditional targets for loans. The idea was to expand home ownership among populations who generally could not afford them or who had poor credit. Banks had to prove that they made an effort to locate bad credit risks and give them loans.
Banks complied with the law. So long as the economy went very well, the industry could absorb losses and many credit risks could continue to pay. When a glitch in the system developed, up to 8% of the mortgage holders in the nation fell behind, some badly. Some folks truly hit hard times. They had jobs they expected to keep, made sound decisions, and were hit by unforeseen issues. Many were undisciplined, made poor decisions, and found themselves in trouble. Banks now held massive amounts of bad debt because of federal government policies that forced them to take it on in the first place.
The banks had the government by the you know whats. They get no money? Fine. They explain to the nation just exactly who got them into trouble in the first place. Instead of disavowing this nice little bit of socialism, we gave out the money and stabilized the system.
Now THE WON (kudos to whoever thought that one up, referring to the arrogant pronouncement to congressional Republicans that "I (Obama) won!" as if that means that Republicans should stop doing their jobs and kowtow) wants to compound the problem by sending many more billions to help people who never should have been homeowners to begin with. Some people responsibly went to their banks, worked out new arrangements, sacrificed, and got their bills paid up. Obama does not want to distinguish between those who sacrificed and those who are still just waiting around for the government to help them. Enough already!
Time for the honest taxpayer to take a stand. Massive federal interference in the market is what intensified a recession and turned it into the Great Depression. Back then it was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Now it is Obamiac spending plans. Let's get a grip here and think for a second before tossing more money away. After all, it is generating the disturbing trend of rising inflation during a contracting economy. Obama is transforming a recession into stagflation.
At least we know how to deal with that. Elect a conservative Republican as president. The way things are going, we ought to see one replace WON in a few years.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Lincoln Ranked First Among Presidents By Panel of Sixty Five Historians
Although not surprising that they picked Abraham Lincoln, frankly they got it dead wrong.
There is one single president that transcends the office even while defining it. No president faced the kinds of challenges overcome by this man. No other president comes close to him when one considers leadership ability, long term effect of his presidency, or any other standard of leadership.
It may be unfashionable to speak the obvious, but George Washington is and will always be the greatest president in United States history.
Before Washington there was no office of the president. The Constitution offered some vague details, but little in the way of guidance. Washington's generation had no contemporary examples to serve as models either. King George III? Thanks, but no thanks. The office of Prime Minister was too tied to the legislative branch for Washington's taste (Congress tended to grate on the Father of our Country's nerves.) Washington looked somewhat to the consuls of the Roman Republic, who held many of the same powers. Most of all he looked to his own common sense.
Washington strove to create balance. He needed balance in foreign affairs. A vulnerable infant nation in a world of rapacious Great Powers could not succumb to any one side, but needed to maintain a dignified neutrality. A nation with no economic growth in 1789 needed to balance the agricultural interest with his own vision of America growing into a commercial empire. He had to balance his attention between his two friends and colleagues Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Most importantly he balanced the need to enhance the respect of the people for the office of president while maintaining an air of republican simplicity.
In short, Washington had to define the office of president and also went a long way towards defining what the United States would be in its distant future. Lincoln was a great president, but no one has ever overcome the kinds of challenges faced by Washington so successfully.
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Predictably the list of presidents rated George W. Bush very low, even below Carter (who actually dropped since the last ranking.) Seven years of prosperity and security combined with a new respect for the United States around the world did not impress the historians. Of course none of them brought a sliver of bias to the table.
Surprisingly, Ronald Reagan, who used to be placed in the middle or near the bottom, reached number ten. George H. W. Bush, once criticized and ranked poorly because he left Saddam Hussein in place in 1991, rose to number 18.Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, James Madison, William McKinley, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower are my top ten.
Why is Theodore Roosevelt as low as he is? The more I read about his domestic policies, the more squeamish I get. Yes the government needed to expand some regulatory powers, but his tended to follow his own whim rather than the rule of law. Were it not for a wildly successful foreign policy, I'd send him lower. I prefer McKinley who had a strong foreign policy and a more limited ideal of government power. Truman goes before Reagan by a hair because he recognized the Soviet threat before many others and challenged it almost from the beginning. James Madison was flexible enough to alter his position during the War of 1812, casting ideology aside in the greater effort to beat the British. I left out Jefferson because his foreign policy led directly to economic disaster. He also used the authority of his office to financially crush political rivals.George W. Bush to me is definitely in the top 20. You cannot lay the current financial crisis at his feet since he tried to get both Republican and Democratic congresses to address the various issues that caused the problems. It would be like blaming Isaiah for the Babylonians conquering Judah. It's not his fault that nobody listened. The second Bush will climb as we get further from his presidency.
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