​

"A Time for ChooSINg,"

 O CT O B ER 27, 1 9 6 4

Ronald

Reagan 

 

 

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.

 

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something

on which

we can

base our hopes for the future.

 

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-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.

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For example, they have voices that say,

, "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 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"t

his 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.

 

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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 percent of the farm surplus

. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market

and has known a 21 percent 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 t

hrough 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 poo

r, 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? 

a judge called me.

He told me of a 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.

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.

 

 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?

 

 

 

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, i

nto 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.

 

 

 

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.

 

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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, t

hey 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