Posted by
Steve Smith from NH on Friday, February 06, 2009 5:16:40 PM
I always have a conflict when I'm trying to write political pieces. I
try to be original, but the fact is, that almost everything smart to
say about being a Republican was already said by President Reagan, and
far better than my meager offerings. I know, he did sometimes use
speech writers, but Reagan did write most of his own material, and
always edited his own speeches. If you've never read "the speech",
please honor his birthday by reading it today. You can see a video of
President Reagan delivering the speech here -
http://reagancoalition.org/ If you change the numbers in the speech,
almost all of it applies to the situation we currently find ourselves
in.
Happy Birthday Mr. President, we miss you.
from http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/rendezvous.asp
Address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater
Rendezvous with Destiny
October 27, 1964
This speech is a verbatim transcript of "The Speech" given as a
portion of a pre-recorded, nationwide televised program sponsored by
Goldwater-Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate
for the presidency whom Ronald Reagan actively supported.
4,626 words
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.