Reagan's
"A Time For Choosing" Speech
Delivered October 27, 1964 in Los Angeles, California.
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 over planted 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.
