Ronald Reagan's Remarks "The Myth of the Great Society" 1965-66

thank you, I have not announced it yet, you make me think that I have been chosen, ladies and gentlemen, you have given me such a warm welcome that it is something that I will always remember, furthermore, if I did not have such reasons to be happy about the form of the greeting and introductions and everyone here tonight, I could be grateful because every once in a while I get introduced and I feel self-conscious when they start introducing me and start mentioning the photos I've been in now. I don't want to say I'm ashamed of them, but everyone who has been in Hollywood for a while has been in some movies and the studio didn't want them well, they wanted them on Thursday and I had my part, but al Yi, in the old ones times, you could usually count on the passing of the years making you forget those images, now, you just stay up late at night in front of the TV, it can all come back to haunt us sometimes, I think it's like looking at a sun.

I never knew you had it. Take a second, right? I have a friend in the business who stays up late to watch his old movies just to see how he gets his hair, but you know, I've been protesting the growth of government for several years. For years I have had concerns that the permanent structure of government would become so large that it would be beyond the control of Congress and the will of the people, and I have believed that this is a problem that crosses partisan lines that I have seen. An interesting development over the years, when I first suggested the danger of government control over the inheritance, so many federal grants, there were people who vehemently denied to Lee that such a thing could happen, and yet, before long, the same people were saying what was wrong with that. government control and in recent days we have heard representatives at the highest levels of government ask us well: are you afraid of your own government or, to be honest, I am and we all should be and I'm not speaking in a partisan sense. of an administration or individuals, I'm talking about the institution of government, wasn't this the warning of the founding fathers that government tends to grow to assume power until eventually freedom is lost?

The fact is, we can't escape it, only the government. He is capable of exercising tyranny. I realize this is a controversial topic, especially as we approach an election year, but if you don't address things that are controversial, you'd never talk at all. One day a man knocked on a door and a little boy answered and the man said son, your father is home and the boy said no, he said it's your mother at home and a voice said no and finally he said well Son, I'm your uncle on your father's side and the boy said well, I guess.

You can come in, but I'll tell you right now that you're on the wrong side. In 1772, the Boston Committee of Correspondence proclaimed the right to life, liberty, and property. Two years later, in Philadelphia, the First Continental Congress declared that Americans had the right to life. freedom and property In June 1776, the Virginia Declaration of Rights affirmed that all men were equally free and independent with the means to own and the right to own and acquire property and three weeks later came the Declaration of Independence, a war victory bloody and then a new nation that would be based on a constitution on a Bill of Rights life, liberty and property had become life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness, it would be seventy years before Lord Acton of England would comment on the task of these men and what they had done. achieved with this document, he would say that they had solved two problems that until then had baffled the most enlightened nations;

They had prodigiously increased the power of the national government and had founded it on the principle of equality without renouncing the security of liberty and property, and it is true. Our Constitution is a contract that guarantees the most limited and equitable government in the long history of man's relationship with man. However, while national power is prodigious, what has happened to the security of liberty and our right to ownership of the fruits of our labor? The philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville said a hundred years ago that the end of freedom comes when the party in power learns that it can be perpetuated through taxes.

Well, what happens to freedom when the executive branch of government can use money taken from the people to coerce? the people, a foolish representative of the sphere, Glenn Andrews, presented an amendment to the poverty program on the floor of Congress. It is almost inconceivable that such an amendment would be necessary. It is even more inconceivable that the amendment was overwhelmingly repudiated and defeated. It was a simple amendment that would prohibit poverty funds from being used for political purposes, make no mistake, the party in power has legislated the existence of a $1.8 billion campaign fund for 1966. Five years ago we reached a new frontier and now we are face to face with a

great

society

and along the way we have added 31 billion dollars to our depth but we have decreased our gold holdings until concern is felt about the solvency of our currency and very soon the currencies that we jingle in our pocket will no longer have the same value. silver ring, but do not fear that we will reach the height of absurdity when recently at a press conference we were told that the government would support these artificial currencies and was willing to exchange them at any time for paper.

We have discovered that every family with an income of less than three thousand dollars a year is plagued by poverty, at the same time we learned that the cost of government is prorated to $3,300 per family, we reached an all-time high in the prices of food, as every housewife here knows, but the farmer who produces that food receives the lowest percentage of the market basket dollar that he has ever received in history and his debt relative to income is at an all-time high. historic, even higher than on the eve of the new crisis of 1929 four and a half years ago.

Years ago there were no daily casualty lists or wives or mothers who received telegrams. We regret to inform you that in the last campaign our opponents presented themselves as conservative in the sense that they would not make any drastic changes to our easy, prosperous, prosperous way. maintain the status quo which is Latin for the mess we are in, we, on the other hand, were presented as radicals who would cause some catastrophic upheaval; well, now that the Great Society is over and a multitude of messages and laws have made it clear that we are going to have the welfare state with an unprecedented federalization of American life.

On June 30, Congress raised the debt limit for the seventh time in five years but our government spends two hundred and sixty million dollars a day ten million dollars more each day than we spent just a year ago we are told we are enjoying unprecedented prosperity, but forty-two government agencies that the government has just informed us are spending $70 billion a year on public welfare and men in high positions in government are seriously debating the idea that there is no longer any need to connect work to income and that a man simply If you are born, you must have an assured annual income without having to work.

The ancient Hebrew book, the Talmud, tells us that if a father does not teach his son to earn a living, it is the same as teaching him to steal, because that could be the inevitable result. Our limited government, with its decentralized powers, has given way to planners, who have increasingly imposed a heavy hand on all facets of life. our lives, to quote de Tocqueville again, warned that such a government would cover the face of

society

with a web of small and complicated minute and uniform rules, and therefore the will of man is not shattered but softened and guides until the nation is reduced to a flock. of timid, hard-working animals whose rule is the shepherd, well, the shepherd that the president likes to quote these days from the Scriptures, his favorite seems to be first Isaiah, verse eighteen, let's reason together now that it has a kind of warmth and welcoming sound , right?, but let your eyes wander for a line or two in the next verses the lines that are not quoted aloud if he refused you will be devoured with the sword freedom freedom is very fragile we only know it from a few moments ago in the entire history of man and most of those moments have taken place here on this earth under this constitutional system and under our free enterprise economic system, but freedom is also indivisible, it is not spelled with an S , you cannot choose to be part free and part slave you are free or you are not free if we ever decide we need a new Declaration of Independence.

I hope we maintain a line of the previous one. He has sent swarms of officers here to harass our people and eat. Today, for every 10,000 of us, it only takes 12 doctors to keep us well and healthy. It only takes 40 mechanics at oil stations for every 10,000 of us to keep our cars running. 37 telephone employees to keep the vast telephone network running. "In this country, but it takes one hundred and thirty federal employees per 10,000 to run the affairs of the state. Federal employees outnumber state employees in 30 of the 50 states. I don't know which one yours is, but that's true in California, and in California that's how it is.

It is not easy for the businessman to be harassed and devoured by our substance. The businessman spends 35 percent of his time completing government forms and regulations. It has been estimated that this government paperwork costs American industry $20 billion a year, which must be added to the price and costs another $7 billion a year just to handle the government's portion of that paperwork and store it and It already takes 25 million million cubic feet at some point back to show you how this can happen there was a small town in New England that decided to get on board with the food surplus idea, now this is a good idea, no one can argue the fact that if we can get a surplus instead of wasting it, we should distribute it to those people who need it, so this small town got on board with the idea. this and got their share of the free federal surplus food and then they woke up one day and found that they were being inundated with a huge amount of paperwork required in connection with this pamphlet and discovered that they had finally hired so many new city employees just to handle this it was cheaper to leave the program and buy retail food at the corner market now that we have declared war on poverty now no one is arguing with the humanitarian objective again I don't think any of us want to be like the guy who heard about the war on poverty, went out and threw a hand grenade at a beggar, but in getting the program passed we heard a lot about a West Virginia state, oh, this became a household word, this was the very center of poverty. and distress and unemployment some of us thought the whole war would be fought right there in West Virginia, now the program is adopted.

West Virginia receives $400,000. Texas receives 10 million. We are winning the war, although at least on one front of its own bureaucratic house. $19,000 a year is a good salary and is very high compensation in government salaries; In fact, there is only one employee in a thousand in the Department of Defense who receives $19,000 a year, only one in 500 in the Department of Agriculture, but in the new anti-poverty program there is 1 in 19 gum. Springs Virginia received seventy-four thousand dollars, fifty-four thousand for the salaries of the administrators, 20 thousand for the poor, while a voice in the government tells us that we are enjoying this excellently. prosperity another voice tells us that one in five in our country suffers from poverty and homelessness now if that number is true it shouldn't be too difficult to find people who need help under this program in my hometown of Dixon Illinois.

A self-proclaimed Tim committee has been established that he is not beholden to any voter and has asked the government for a grant of thirty-eight thousand dollars so he can conduct a search and find out if there is poverty there. It decomposes decomposes into ten thousand two hundred. dollars for the president and seventy two hundred dollars each for two assistants and the rest will go to the secretaries' post office expenses and travel to another area. More than two thousand college graduates have been hired as part of the program to study the culture of poverty. Nobody disagrees with the youth part of that program, the idea that we should rescue, if possible, those young people who for whatever reason have not managed to adapt to the responsibilities of adult life, but rather we take over a hotel and we install their ladies who have been taken from indigent families and now we have to train them to be self-sufficientand they can go out on their own and earn a living, but while they are retrained they are provided with cleaning services so that they do not have to make their own beds and the program charges fees of seven thousand dollars a year for each young woman who Let's help.

There are many families in this country raising good, productive citizens on less than seven thousand dollars a year. I can't think of any nobler purpose than to welcome young people and make sure they have the same opportunities at the beginning of life, but now we have such a program and we place young people in camps to retrain and give them We pay a higher salary than what we give to the young man who puts on a uniform and goes out to defend his country. I am sure we all agree, all responsible citizens agree that we must provide shelter to those people who, through no fault of their own, lack adequate housing and for some time the government has provided public housing, but now Those who administer the program expressed concern after almost three decades of this that an entire generation has grown up raising children and a second and a third.

The current generation is growing up assuming that this is an acceptable way of life and there is no incentive for them to improve because getting a raise could destroy their eligibility to continue living on a subsidy in public housing, and yet they never Does the government accept that it may be responsible with some of its programs for this trend or this trend? No, now we are going to have a program that subsidizes rents and, under the technicalities of the program, people with incomes of up to 11 or 12 thousand dollars a year. They will be eligible to live in a house or apartment or in a neighborhood beyond their means with their new thrifty neighbors.

Text to help pay the differential in your rent. A variety of programs have diluted private property rights so that the public interest is whatever planners decided it should be. For generations we have had traditional eminent domain laws, we have recognized the government's occasional need to take a citizen's property when there is a clear and present need for that particular property in the public interest, but the citizen had his day in court. first, to establish that the government paid a fair price and second, that the government should be required to demonstrate that there was a clear and present need;

Now urban renewal gives the government the right to force the sale of private property for the government to resell to other private parties. citizens who can then use that property to make a profit and we have an average sale of herb renewal properties to private citizens for 30% of the investment that we, the taxpayers, in that property again I say the purpose is noble, the idea of ​​providing decent homes for all Americans. and eliminating slums, but 1 million people have been bulldozed and ended up in new slums paying higher rent. The law says that displaced people must be offered standard housing with rents they can afford in convenient locations, but if they can be offered standard housing with rents if they had been available, they would not have needed an urban renewal program, they would have moved there. on your own.

Robert Weaver, the federal housing commissioner, said at the beginning that he made this statement public, that the government gave the use of the land to the people to accelerate their development now I didn't remember the history that way I thought we were here and on the land and we created the government but he says but he has now announced that it is government policy to try to claim full control of the use of land claims equipped with surveying instruments fly over American farms inspect from the air precisely to see if the farmer has violated his allotment of planting and if you have done so you are guilty of what you are charged with in court and fined and if you cannot pay the fine prescribed by the regulations the government can seize your farm and sell it at auction to enforce paying that fine for 30 years we have had an agricultural program we have spent billions to make the farmer more prosperous and remove unnecessary surplus land from agricultural production to reduce the surplus and during that same period the national income has tripled but farmers' income is less than 30 years ago and we have increased the number of acres cultivated by 50 million for every dollar.

What we spent on price stabilization in 1948, today we are spending twenty-five dollars, we have reduced the number of farms by half and the government says that another two and a half million farmers are unnecessary and must be retrained and transferred to city jobs , meanwhile in the At the same time, the Appalachian program provides millions of dollars to reclaim marginal lands so that the unemployed can become farmers in that area and increase the current agricultural surplus, and an ominous question remains unanswered: who will decide which citizens should abandon the land and how a decision is made, how will we also explain that the same government that says we only need 1 million large commercial farms now that there is no need for small family farmers is still the government that tells us with another Since no farm larger than 160 acres can receive water from federal irrigation projects, somehow one suspects that the government in all its involvement in the farm program will turn out to be something less and a cheerful green giant as the web of rules grows ever larger.

Newton Munich more uniform as de Tocqueville warned On the Mason-Dixon line, on a road used by northerners who go south on vacation, there is an oil station, a very enterprising salesman who runs it on a small triangular piece of land, you know, between the sidewalk and the driveway which is very often covered with gravel or paved. There he planted a few cotton bushes. Now, when a tourist arrives from the north, he gives them, picks a ball of cotton from the bush right in front of them and gives it to them as a souvenir of their trip to the south. fined by the federal government for planting cotton without an allotment, the post office was recently exposed for having for the past few years been taking letters addressed to citizens from the post office and turning them over to the Internal Revenue Service if those citizens were too late or delinquent in paying their income taxes and now we find out that Washington is going to subsidize art and literature.

The plan requires two tsars with millions of dollars that they will distribute based on what they consider significant. in art and literature, well, if they follow the pattern of some of the government-sponsored scientific research programs, there is reason to worry. I'm not a scientist, but I sometimes have the suspicion that the government is simply subsidizing intellectual curiosity when I see thousands of dollars spent on research into philology and faunal affinities of fossil bryozoans in the middle or divide through the Silurian now the only thing that I understand it's that sentence in the middle there I know who they're talking about but nothing is too small for the government overlooks the government in Washington is now concerned about our ability to enjoy the outdoors. recreational facilities that just published a 134-page brochure on the subject.

It is full of depths. I wonder how we managed to live without it so far. Now, for example, if you design a camping site, you must provide drinking fountains at such a height that the drinking level is convenient for the people using the fountain, but where did it come from, where did it come to the exciting chapter on insects? wild things that get into your ears? of nature lovers sometimes create painful conditions. I have news for them. It's not fun when it happens indoors. That's not all they have to say about wildlife. If your recreational area has a bathhouse intended for use by both men and women, it should be divided into two parts by a narrow partition now you know, honestly, we would never have thought of that on our own, although I know they are only intended to be useful.

I know it's a really humane nation, they're motivated by the most humanitarian idealism, it's just natural that they see the problems and see the immediate problem and suggest, oh, if we had a little more money, a little more power, than we would. what we could do for the people now in an atmosphere of emergency and excessive zeal for our well-being, the federal government. proposes to invade an area that is the traditional province of the local community and establish the best public school system in the world with no real determination yet that the federal government is the best steward of our educational affairs, the suspicion prevails that they are not so much.

They are interested in accelerating progress, as they are in asserting authority in every conceivable aspect of the educational system, an educational system that has worked very well and has been responsive to parental input, but Washington insists that it only wants help solve the financial problems facing our rapid progress. The growth problems exist particularly because the federal government in recent years has dried up many sources of local income by usurping those sources for its own tax policies, but that same government has figures that reveal that we at the local level in the last decade have increased school revenues by one hundred and fifty-six percent, we have built classrooms worth thirty billion dollars in ten years, we have reduced the ratio of students to teachers and students to classrooms and we have increased the average salary of teachers by one sixty-five percent, and yet every suggestion we make to allocate tax money and allow it to remain at the local level without first passing it through those puzzle palaces on the Potomac is met with

great

resistance, since there are one hundred and thirty-five five separate federal agencies and officials doling out money at the university level Some time ago, a group of distinguished university presidents, alarmed by the degree to which academic freedom has been compromised by these enormous grant money, went to Washington and had a proposal: had put together a proposal to allow the individual citizen to calculate their income tax and then deduct a specific amount and contribute to the university of their choice instead of paying it in income tax and the government would not do so, the government determine the appropriate amount that would solve the problem and still not disrupt the government's own economy or need for revenue and would therefore avoid the issue of separation of church and state of saying that an individual citizen chose to contribute with their money to a church-supported school over and over again in Washington, they kept asking, but why?

Won't this system work? And finally a Freudian slip occurred. Frances Keppel, America's chief education officer, blurted out: "You don't understand, according to the plan you proposed, we couldn't achieve our social goals. Social goals. And now we discovered a memorandum thanks to the Actually, a memorandum in the relations service community programs of the anti-poverty program have nothing to do with education, but the memo is very disturbing. In this sentence we should carry out systematic contact with all publishers and school boards to encourage their publication and adoption of textbooks that meet the established standards well if the government is going to build the schools and buy the books they issue scholarships they issue judgments and exert pressure what if one day that pressure is political in nature and is not to our liking education is the bulwark of freedom but you remove it? too far from the community and parental control and education becomes a tool of tyranny, already here and there in our land there are too many students who study in textbooks that dedicate a chapter to public welfare and not a line to Patrick Henry sometimes when Look at the problem.

He believes governments like babies. It is an elemental channel with appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. We are taxed on our food and drink at our shelter and the government takes a higher percentage. the free and productive economy that any government has done in history without ruining the so-called tax reform when it is suggested to complain is the old game of the shells that have just reorganized, changed it and applied it elsewhere as we discovered with the so-called tax The cut we thought we had today our tax policy is based on the idea that we are robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Well, we better take another look. We're robbing Paul to pay Paul and we're all called Paul. Peter declared bankruptcy. Planned and deliberate inflation over the past three decades has long reduced the value of our dollar to thirty-five and a half cents. Well, how did this come about? Mainly because we have perverted our constitution, we have perverted it with respect to a clauseof welfare that does not exist. There is no pervert in terms of the misuse of the tax system, pervert in terms of the interpretation of the clauses on Interstate Commerce and we have done it under such high-sounding phrases as the greatest good for the greatest number or one person -voting forgetting that Majority rule becomes mob rule unless there is a set of basic rules that protect the individual's right to life the right to life the right to life the freedom to worship freedom to speak to assemble in summary our God-given inalienable rights may not be put to a vote the very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to put them forever beyond the reach of majority rule a hundred years ago the nation's problem was a half slave and half free nation and if such nation could survive and today it is a world half slave and half free and if humanity itself can survive we call the garden the night and ask if all is well on deck, back from the shores of the potomac comes the news that there is nothing that fear.

We have nothing to fear but an evil enemy that since World War II has increased the slavery of a country from 8% of the world's population to nearly forty percent. Every lesson of history tells us that as a nation has grown in culture and refinement and advanced, it has mellowed. and when we face the barbarians, the less cultured, the barbarians of triumph, you and I have reached our moment of truth. Do men exist only with the permission and for the good of the State? A group that marches towards eternity in a super ant. control your own destiny this is a question that must be answered by all of us regardless of party to those who are Democrats ask yourselves if the leadership of your party still follows the precepts of Jefferson Jackson and Cleveland take the platform of 1932 on which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected with his demand for a 25% reduction in the cost of the federal government to restore constitutional limits on that government's power and return to states, local communities, and individuals the rights that had been taken from them.

They ask them which party would feel more comfortable with those promises today. I know that the bond of loyalty to the party is very strong. I was a Democrat most of my life. I know that it is difficult to make a change of part and party of your entire life. choosing without feeling that you are being betrayed is unfair, I tell you that you have no feeling of disloyalty if you have decided that you can no longer follow the leadership of that party tonight because the leadership of that party has long since abandoned you and now for those of us of another party for those of us who are Republicans today, the Republican Party is the vehicle that we must use as a party in opposition to the wrong leadership at home and in opposition to all the evil abroad that threatens the dignity and freedom of man in all countries. countries and it is a huge responsibility and you and I, who are Republicans, cannot face it with a divided party for too long we have been complete Republicans with descriptive adjectives and hyphens before the word moderate republicans liberal republicans conservative republicans whatever the label that we chose the truth is that we have been foolish republicans those adjectives and those hyphens were given to us by our opponents and the time has come to group them and return them if we have to cling to - simply be a good republican or a republican republican we can shrink in the shadow of a philosophy that we detest but are afraid to challenge or we can rise from a defeat and begin the second round of our fight to restore the Republic and now there are those among us who are Republicans who, understandably, are so hungry to return to the position we once had to restore some equality in these two years. party system to restore the imbalance we have now, who has suggested, albeit a little cynically, that perhaps we should start talking to voting blocs and make promises that perhaps we should even reshape our party in the image of the party victorious, on the basis that perhaps an imitation could be achieved. more votes than we have been attracting.

Well, I would like to suggest that there is a block that we can appeal to. It's a voting bloc of millions and millions of people. Cross party lines. The ethnic lines. Religious and racial lines. The economic lines. It is made up of millions. of unsung heroes people who get up in the morning send their children to school and go to work contribute to their church, their charity and their community believe that they were created in the image of God and that God is the author of their rights and freedoms and they are worried because their children can no longer ask for God's blessing in a classroom.

I tell you that that bloc of voters can be ours, not if we go to them with some copycat or airplay program, but only if we are willing to resist. In principle, yes, let us be ready to tell them that we too want to solve and will solve as best we can the problems of poverty, hunger, health, old age and unemployment, but we believe that we can do it without this resulting in undue coercion and fiscal irresponsibility that we believe we can put a floor below which no American will have to live in degradation, but at the same time we will not erect a ceiling above which no citizen can fly without being penalized for his initiative in his effort and let us tell them that, no matter how tough the problems are on the world stage, we will not do it by protecting ourselves against the bomb threat, by trading the freedom of people in other lands that are not ours, and let us tell them that if their children are is going to ask you to fight and die for your country at the same time, all the Republicans who have been entrusted with this responsibility today will be allowed to win because it is ours, I tell you to look deep into your own hearts and ask yourselves if it is possible that You may have some difference with any other Republic, but this challenge we face tonight is more important.

If so, if you are not willing to face this challenge, then you better start preparing yourself and decide what you will tell your children. What you found more important than freedom. They will want to know.