Ronald Regan 10/27/64

By Ronald Regan

“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 man’s age-old 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…

Senator Fulbright [Bill Clinton’s mentor, BTW] 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 [D] 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…

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?

But the reverse is true.  Each year the need grows greater, the program grows greater.  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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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.”

Is there anything else that needs to be said?  Even 43 years later?  The benevolent dictatorship the Democrats continue to propose still smells, looks, and feels like fascism.