1、Ronald Reagan: “A Time for Choosing“ (aka “The Speech“)delivered 27 October 1964, Los Angeles, CAProgram 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
2、been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasnt 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 rece
3、ntly 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, “Weve never had it so good.“But I have an
4、uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isnt 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 collectors share, and yet ou
5、r government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We havent balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. Weve 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 debt
6、s of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we dont own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And weve 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 wo
7、nder 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 Ame
8、rican is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. Were at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and its been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greate
9、st astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think its 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
10、had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We dont 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, theres
11、 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 mans relation to man. This is the issue of this e
12、lection: 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 betwe
13、en a left or right. Well Id like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. Theres only an up or down - up mans 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 huma
14、nitarian 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.
15、 But theyve 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.“ Anoth
16、er 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 Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constit
17、ution 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 Pennsyl
18、vania, 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
19、is a term we havent 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 dont control things. A government cant control the economy without controlling people. And th
20、ey 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 examp
21、le of this than governments 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
22、 the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming - thats regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years weve spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we dont grow.Senator Humphrey last week charged that
23、 Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because hell find out that weve had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. Hell also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Cong
24、ress an extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. Hell find that theyve also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldnt keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnatio
25、n 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, theres been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. Theres now one for every 30 farms
26、in the United States, and still they cant 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 k
27、now whats 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 dil
28、uted 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
29、for what government officials call a “more compatible use of the land.“ The President tells us hes now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore weve only built them in the hundreds. But FHA Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans Administration tell us they
30、have 120,000 housing units theyve taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, weve 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.Theyve just declared Rice
31、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 youre depressed, lie down and be depressed.We have so many people who cant see a
32、 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 theyre 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
33、theyve had almost 30 years of it - shouldnt we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldnt 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 great
34、er; 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 were told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a ye
35、ar. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. Were spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and youll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, wed be able to give each family 4,600
36、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.“
37、 Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion were spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have - and remember, this new program doesnt replace any, it just duplicates existing programs - do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear
38、by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isnt duplicated. This is the youth feature. Were now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps Civilian Conservation Corps, and were going to p
39、ut our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that were 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, dont get me wrong. Im not suggesting Harvard is the answer to
40、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 whod come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husban
41、d was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. Shes eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood whod already done that very thing.Yet anytime you and I question the scheme
42、s of the do-gooders, were denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say were always “against“ things - were never “for“ anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that theyre ignorant; its just that they know so much that isnt so. Now - were for a provision that dest
43、itution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end weve accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.But were against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of th
44、e program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. Theyve 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 “insuran
45、ce“ 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 m
46、oment 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 theyre doing just that.A young man, 21 years of age, working at an
47、 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 hes 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we
48、so lacking in business sense that we cant put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when theyre due - that the cupboard isnt bare?Barry Goldwater thinks we can.At the same time, cant we introduce voluntary features that would permit a
49、 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? Shouldnt you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think were for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of fu
