Here is the video clip of Reagan's speech. Scroll down for
the transcript.
It follows the full text transcript of
Ronald Reagan's A Time for Choosing speech, delivered
at Los Angeles, California - October 27, 1964.
Thank you.
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 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
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
out of every dollar earned in this country is
the tax collector's share, and yet our
government continues to spend 17 million dollars
a day more than the government takes in. We
haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last
34 years. We've 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
of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold
in our treasury; we don't own an ounce. Foreign
dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And
we've 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're at war with the
most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind
in his long climb from the swamp to the stars,
and it's been said if we lose that war, and in
so doing 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." And in that
sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose
freedom here, there's 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 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 capitol can plan our lives for us
better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to
choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to
suggest there is no such thing as a left or
right. There's only an up or down—[up] man's
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
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've 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." Another 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 Constitution 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 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.
Now, we have no better example of this than
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 percent
of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is
out on the free market and has known a 21
percent increase in the per capita consumption
of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of
farming—that's regulated and controlled by the
federal government. In the last three years
we've spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program
for every dollar 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'll find out that we've had a
decline of 5 million in the farm population
under these government programs. He'll 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'll find that they've 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's been an increase in
the Department of Agriculture employees. There's
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 how—who are farmers to know
what's 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 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 for what government officials call a "more
compatible use of the land." The President tells
us he's now going to start building public
housing units in the thousands, where heretofore
we've only built them in the hundreds. But FHA
[Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans
Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing
units they've taken back through mortgage
foreclosure. For three decades, we've 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've 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 dollars on deposit in
personal savings in their banks. And 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 the fat man got that way by taking
advantage of the thin one. So they're 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 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're told that 9.3 million families in this
country are poverty-stricken on the basis of
earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare
spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark
depths of the Depression. We're spending 45
billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little
arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided
the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9
million poor families, we'd be able to give each
family 4,600 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." Now do they honestly
expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion
dollars to the 45 billion we're 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
there is one part of the new program that isn't
duplicated. This is the youth feature. We're now
going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile
delinquency, by reinstituting something like the
old CCC camps [Civilian Conservation Corps], and
we're going to put our young people in these
camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we
find that we're 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, don't get me wrong.
I'm not suggesting 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'd 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 dollars a month. She
wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise.
She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the
Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the
idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd
already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of
the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against
their humanitarian goals. They say we're always
"against" things—we're never "for" anything.
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is
not that they're ignorant; it's just that they
know so much that isn't so.
Now—we're for a provision that destitution
should not follow unemployment by reason of old
age, and to that end we've accepted Social
Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we're 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 people who depend on
them for a livelihood. They've 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
"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 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 they're
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 dollars a month
at age 65. The government promises 127. He could
live it up until he's 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
they can get them when they're 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
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? Shouldn't you and I be allowed
to declare who our beneficiaries will be under
this program, which we cannot do? I think we're
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're
against forcing all citizens, regardless of
need, into a compulsory government program,
especially when we have such examples, as was
announced last week, when France admitted that
their Medicare program is 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're for an international organization,
where the nations of the world can seek peace.
But I think we're 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 nations that represent less than
10 percent of the world's population. I think
we're 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 the Soviet
colonies in the satellite nations.
I think we're for aiding our allies by sharing
of our material blessings with those nations
which share in our fundamental beliefs, but
we're against doling out money government to
government, creating bureaucracy, if not
socialism, all over the world. We set out to
help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've
spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we
bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile
Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek
undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] 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
dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are
receiving foreign aid from this country.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in
size. So governments' 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—federal employees number two
and a half million; and federal, state, and
local, one out of six of the nation's work force
employed by 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 at 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 dollar 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.
Last February 19th at the University of
Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times 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.
But 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, because 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 til 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 to the—or the title to
your business or property if the government
holds the power of life and death over that
business or property? And 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, unalienable 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're 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've 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've never
known a man in my life I believed 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
monthly checks for life to an employee who was
ill and couldn't work. He provides nursing care
for the children of mothers who work in the
stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in
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. And 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 a fellow named Barry Goldwater
sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks
before Christmas, all day long, he'd load up the
plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their
homes, 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 on 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 the other problems I've discussed
academic, unless we realize we're in a war that
must be won.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup
kitchen of the welfare state have told us they
have a utopian solution of peace without
victory. They call their policy "accommodation."
And they say if we'll only avoid any direct
confrontation with the enemy, he'll 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 on 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 human beings now
enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your
dreams of freedom because to save our own skins,
we're 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." Now let's set
the record straight. There's no argument over
the choice between peace and war, but there's
only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and
you can have it in the next second—surrender.
Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we
follow other than this, but every lesson of
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 or 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're retreating
under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday
when the time comes to deliver the final
ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary,
because by that time we will have been weakened
from within spiritually, morally, and
economically. He believes this because from our
side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at
any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one
commentator put it, he'd 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." And this—this is the meaning in the
phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through
strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny
of man is not measured by material computations.
When great forces are on the move in the world,
we learn we're spirits—not animals." And he
said, "There's 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'll preserve for our children this, the last
best hope of man on earth, or we'll 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.
Also called the
Persian Wars, the Greco-Persian Wars were
fought for almost half a century from 492 BC -
449 BC. Greece won against enormous odds. Here
is more:
