Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech October 27, 1964

The following pre-recorded political program is sponsored by TV for Goldwater Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for President of the United States, ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present a thoughtful

speech

by Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan, thank you, thank you very much. Good evening, the sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television shows, the actor has not been provided with a script; In fact, I have been allowed to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas about the election we face in the coming weeks. I have spent most of my life as a Democrat.

Recently I have deemed it appropriate to pursue another course. I think the issues can cross partisan lines. Now one side of this campaign has been telling us what the issues of this election are. They are the maintenance of peace and prosperity, the line has been used, we have never had it so good, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity is not something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived. a tax burden that reached one-third of its national income today, 37 cents of every dollar earned in this country is the share of the tax collectors and yet our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than it takes in , we have not balanced our budget 28 of the last 34 years we have increased our debt limit three

time

s in the last 12 months and now our national debt is 1 and a half

time

s greater than all the combined debts of all the nations in the world we have $15 thousand millions In gold in our treasury we do not possess a single ounce.

Foreign dollar claims amount to $27.3 billion and we have just announced that the 1939 dollar will now purchase 45 cents of its total value in terms of the peace we would preserve. I wonder who. Among Us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or child 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 we just want to be left alone? There can be no real peace while an American is dying somewhere in the world, for the rest of us we are at war with the most dangerous enemy humanity has ever faced in its long climb from the swamp to the stars and it has been said Yes If we lose that war and in doing so we lose this form of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest amazement that those who had the most to lose were the ones who did the least to prevent it from happening.

Well, I think it's time for us to ask ourselves if we still know. the freedoms that the founding fathers intended for us not long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who was escaping Castro and in the middle of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said: I don't know how lucky we are and the Cuban stopped and said how lucky you are I had somewhere to escape to and in that sentence he told us the whole story if we lose our freedom here there is no place to escape to this is the last position on Earth and this idea that the government is beholden to the people and has no other source of power except the sovereign people remains the newest and only idea in the entire long history of man's relationship 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 small intellectual elite in a capital far away can plan our lives better than we ourselves can, you and I are increasingly being told I have to choose. between left or right.

Well, I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as left or right. There is only up or down. The old age of man. He dreams of the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order. Lots of totalitarianism and regardless of their sincerity and humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course in this era of vote gathering, they use terms like the Great Society or as the president told us a few days ago. we must accept more government activity in the affairs of the people, but they have been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves and all the things I am going to quote have now appeared in print.

They are not Republican accusations, for example. voices that say the Cold War will end with our acceptance of a non-undemocratic socialism another voice says that the profit motive has become obsolete and must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state or our traditional system of individual freedom will be unable to solve complex problems of the 20th century, Senator Fulbright said at Stanford University that the constitution is outdated, referred to the president as our moral teacher and our leader, and says his task is hindered by the power restrictions it imposes on him this outdated document. He must be freed so that he can do for us what he knows is best, and Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another eloquent spokesman, defines liberalism as the satisfaction of the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government. .

Well, for my part, it bothers me that 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 sheer power of centralized government, this was exactly what the founding fathers sought. minimize they knew that governments do not control things a government cannot control the economy without controlling people and they know that when a government sets out to do so it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose they also knew those founding fathers who Outside of its legitimate functions, the government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.

Now we have no better example of this than government involvement in the agricultural economy over the last 30 years, since 1955 the cost of this program has almost doubled 1/4 of agriculture in the United States is responsible for 85% of the agricultural surplus . 34s of agriculture is on the free market and has seen a 21% increase in per capita consumption of all its products. It is seen that 1/4 of agriculture is regulated. and controlled by the federal government in the last three years we have spent $43 on the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we do not grow. Senator Humphrey charged last week that Barry Goldwater, as president, would seek to eliminate farmers he should.

His task will be a little better because he will discover that we have had a 5 million decrease in the agricultural population thanks to these government programs. He will also discover that the Democratic administration has tried to get an extension of the farm program from Congress. To include the 34 who are now free, you will find that they have also asked for the right to imprison farmers who would not keep books as prescribed by the federal government, the secretary of agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through eminent domain and resell them to other people and in that same program there was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to eliminate 2 million farmers from the soil at the same time that there has been an increase in the number of employees of the Department of Agriculture; now there is one for every 30 farms. in the United States and they still can't tell us how 66 shipments of grain bound for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billy Solest never left the coast.

All responsible farmers and agricultural organizations have repeatedly called on the government to liberate the agricultural economy, but like who? Should farmers know what is best for them? Wheat Farmers voted against a wheat program. The government approved it anyway. Now the price of bread is going up. The price of wheat for farmers drops. Meanwhile, in the city, under urban renewal. The assault on freedom takes place. about private property rights so diluted that the public interest is almost whatever a few government planners decide it should be in a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy we see spectacles like in Cleveland, Ohio, a million and half dollars.

The building completed just 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 will now begin building thousands of public housing units, here we go , because we've only built hundreds of them, but The FHA and the Veterans Administration tell us that they have 120,000 housing units that they have repossessed through foreclosures over three decades. We have tried to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The Area Redevelopment Agency has just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area.

Rice County in Kansas has 200 oil wells and the 14,000 people there have more than $30 million in personal savings deposits in their banks. When the government tells you you're depressed, go to bed. and get depressed, we have so many people who can't see a fat man standing next to a thin man without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got like this by taking advantage of the thin man, so they are going to solve all the problems of human misery by through government and government planning well now, if government planning and welfare had the answer and they've had almost 30 years of that, shouldn't we expect the government to read us the score from time to time?

They tell us about the decrease each year in the number of people who need help, the reduction in the need for public housing, but the opposite happens each year, the need grows, the program grows, they told us four years ago that 17 million people They went to bed hungry. every night, well that was probably true, everyone was on a diet, but now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are affected by poverty because they earn less than $3,000 a year and spend 10 times as much on welfare that in the dark depths of the depression, we are spending $45 billion on welfare.

Now let's do a little arithmetic and we'll discover that if we divided the $45 billion equally among those 9 million poor families, we could give each family $4,600 a year. and this added to your current income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, only costs about $600 per family, it would seem that somewhere 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 a billion dollars to the 45 billion we will spend one more program than the 30 we have?

Remember that this new program does not replace any, it simply duplicates existing programs. Do you think poverty? Magic is going to suddenly disappear. Well, to be fair, I should explain that there is a part of the new program that is not duplicated. This is the youth feature. Now we are going to solve the problem of juvenile delinquency, school dropouts, by reinstating something like the old one. CCC camps and we are going to place our youth in these camps, but again we do some arithmetic and we find out that we are going to spend each year only on room and board for each youth that we help. $4,700 a year we can send.

We'll send them to Harvard for 2700 of course, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile crime, but seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me that a young woman who had appeared before him asking for a divorce, she had six children, was pregnant with his seven, during her interrogation, she revealed that her husband was a worker who earned $250 a month, she wanted him divorce get an increase to the $80 he was eligible for. $330 a month in the dependent children assistance program.

He came up with the idea from two women in his neighborhood who had already done the same thing, but every time you and I questioned the do-gooders' plans, they were denounced for being against their humanitarian goals, they say. We are always against things, we are never in favor of anything, the problem with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, it is just that they know so many things that they do not, now we are in favor of a provision that should not follow the misery. unemployment due to old age and for this we have accepted Social Security as a step to solve the problem but we are against those in charge of this program when they practice deception about their fiscal deficiencies by accusing that any criticism of the program means that we want to end the payments to those people who depend on them to make a living.

They called it Insurance in 100 million posts, but then they went before the Supreme Court and testified that it was a welfare program that only used the term insurance Insurance to sell it to people and said that Social Security dues are a tax on the general use of the government and the government has used that tax, notthere is substance because Robert Buers, the chief actuary, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security right now is $298 billion total, but he said there should be no cause for concern because as long as they had the power to tax , they could always take from people what they needed to get them out of trouble.

There are problems and what they are doing is that a 21-year-old young man who works with an average salary and his social security contribution would buy an insurance policy on the open market that would guarantee him $220 a month at age 65, the government promises him that he could live to be 127 years old. 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 solid footing so that the people who do require those payments find that they can do so? ?

Barry Goldwater believes that we can, at the same time, not introduce voluntary features that would allow a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused by presenting evidence that he had made provisions for the years unpaid should we not allow a widow with children to work and not lose benefits supposedly paid by her late 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 are in favor of telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care due to lack of funds, but I think we are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, to participate in a mandatory government program, especially when we have examples like the one announced last week when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt, they have reached the end of the road, plus Barry Goldw was so irresponsible when he suggested that our government will abandon its program of deliberate planned inflation so that, when you receive your Social Security pension, a dollar can buy a dollar's worth. and not 45 cents, 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 defective that today it can meet a second vote. on the floor of the general assembly among nations that represent less than 10% of the world's population, I believe that we are against the hypocrisy of attacking our allies because here and there they cling to a colony while we engage in a conspiracy of We remain silent and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.

I think we are in favor of helping our allies by sharing our material blessings with those nations that share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money in government. to the government creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, around the world we set out to help 19 countries we are helping 107 we have spent $146 billion with that money we have bought a $2 million yacht for highly salasi we bought evening gowns for Greek businessmen extra wives for Kenyan government officials we bought a thousand televisions for a place where they have no electricity in the last 6 years 52 nations have bought our gold worth 7 billion dollars and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country no government has voluntarily reduces in size, so government programs once launched never really go away a government office is the closest thing to eternal life we ​​will ever see on this Earth federal employees federal employees number 2 and A5 million and federal state and local one of For every six of the nation's workforce employed by the government, these proliferating offices with their thousands of regulations have cost as many of our constitutional safeguards as how many of us realize that today federal agents can invade the property of a man without a warrant, can impose a fine without a formal hearing much less a jury trial and can seize and sell your property at auction to enforce payment of that fine in Chico County, Arkansas.

James Weir overplanted his rice plot, the government obtained a $177,000 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 on February 19 at the University of Minnesota Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, said that if Barry Goldwater became president he would stop the advance of socialism in the U.S. America, I think that's exactly what they will do, but as a former Democrat I can tell you that Norman Thomas is not the only man who has drawn this parallel with socialism with the current administration because back in 1936, the Democrat Mr.

Al Smith himself, a great American, came before the American people and charged that his party leadership was leading the party of Jefferson Jackson and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx Lenin and Stalin and walked away from his party and never returned until the day of his death because this day, the leadership of that party has been leading that honorable party down the path in the image of the socialist labor party of England. Expropriation or confiscation of private property or businesses is now not required to impose socialism on a people. means that if you own the deed or title to your business or property, if the government has the power of life and death over that business or property and such machinery already exists, the government can find some charge to file against any concern you choose . prosecute every businessman has his own story of harassment somewhere a perversion has occurred our inalienable natural rights are now considered a dispensation of government and freedom has never been so fragile so close to slipping out of our hands as it is in this moment of ours Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues that they want to raise with you and I think this is a race between two men in which we must simply choose between two personalities, well what about this man that they would destroy and by destroying him would they destroy that one?

That he represents the ideas that you and I hold dear is the brash, shallow, happy man they say he's fine. I have had the privilege of knowing him when I met him long before he dreamed of aspiring to high office and I can tell you personally that I have never met a man in my life whom I believed so incapable of doing anything dishonest or dishonorable. This is a man who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before the unions had thought about it. He put health and medical insurance for all of his employees He took 50% of pre-tax profits and established a retirement program A pension plan for all of His employees He sent monthly checks for life to an employee He was sick and couldn't work He provided nursing care for the children of mothers working in stores when Mexico was devastated by flooding on the Rio Grande.

He got on his plane and took me by plane, he flew medicines and supplies there and an xgi told me how he met him, it was the week before. Christmas during the Korean War and he was at the airport in Los Angeles trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas and he said there were a lot of military there and there were no seats available on the PLS and then a voice came over on the loudspeaker and said: Men in uniform who wanted to travel to Arizona went to Runway so-and-so and got off there.

There was a guy named Barry Water sitting on his plane every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day he would load the plane and take it to Arizona take them to their houses take them back to get another load for the split second from a The Hectic campaign. This is a man who took the time to sit next to 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 him. I'd like him to know that I care. This is a man who told his 19-year-old son there's no rock like a rock. honesty and justice and when you start to build your life on that rock with the cement of faith in God that you have, then you have a real beginning.

This is not a man who would carelessly send other people's Children to war and that is the issue of this campaign he makes. All the other issues I have discussed are academic, unless we realize we are in a war. that must be earned. Those who would exchange 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 it their policy of accommodation and they say that if we avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his bad habits. and will learn to love us.

All those who oppose them are accused of being warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, maybe there. It's a simple answer, it's not an easy answer but it is simple, if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy to be based on what we know in our hearts is morally right, we can't buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the Bomb by committing an immorality as great as telling a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain to abandon their dreams of freedom because to save our own skins we are willing to make a deal with its slave masters Alexander Hamilton said a nation that can prefer misfortune to danger is ready for a master and deserves it now let's make things clear there is no discussion about the choice between peace and war but there is only one guaranteed way to have peace and you can have it in the next second surrender It is true that there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of History tells us that the greatest risk lies in appeasement and this is the specter that our well-meaning friends liberals refuse to face: that their policy of accommodation is appeasement and there is no choice between peace and war only between fight or surrender if we continue to accommodate continue to retreat and retreat eventually we will have to face the final demand the ultimatum and what then, well , Nikita Kusf has told his people, he knows what our response will be.

He told them that we are withdrawing under the pressure of the Cold War and that one day, when the time comes to give the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by then we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices asking for peace at any price or better red than dead or as one commentator said he would rather live on his knees than die standing and there is the path to war because those voices do not 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 bought at the price of chains and slavery, if nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin right in front of this? enemy or Moses would have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs should Christ have rejected the cross if the patriots had conquered Bridge they threw down their weapons and refused to fire the shot around the world the martyrs of History were not fools and our honored Dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis did not die in vain.

Where then is the path to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all, you and I have the courage to tell our enemies that there is a price we will not pay there is a point beyond which they must not advance and this is the meaning of Berry Goldwater's phrase peace through force Winston Churchill said that the destiny of man is not measured by material calculations when when great forces move around in the world we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and he said that something is happening in time and space and Beyond the time and space that, whether we like it or not, means Duty, you and I have a date with Destiny that we will preserve for our Children, this is the last and best hope of man on Earth or we will sentence them to give the last step towards a thousand years of Darkness.

We will keep that in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us, he has faith that you and I have the ability, the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny. Thank you very much, thank you Ronnie for the very moving

speech

. I'm John Kilroy, national president of TV for Goldwater Miller. I want to ask each of you. I want to ask you. May each of you participate in this important presidential campaign by contributing what you can to keep the Goldwater Crusade on the air send one1 $50 or any amount to TV for Goldwater Miller box 80 Los Angeles 51 I repeat TV Goldwater Miller box 80 Los Angeles 51 The political programPrevious prerecorded was paid for by TV for Goldwater Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for President of the United States.