AmericanRhetoric.com

Ronald Reagan:
“A Time For Choosing”

Delivered
27
October
1964, Los
Angeles,
CA

AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED:
Text
version below
transcribed
directly
from
audio

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.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
1

AmericanRhetoric.com

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 selfgovernment
or
whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a
fardistant
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
oldaged
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 voteharvesting
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.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
2

AmericanRhetoric.com

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. Onefourth
of
farming in America is responsible for 85% of the farm surplus. Threefourths
of farming is out
on the free market and has known a 21% increase in
the per capita consumption of all its
produce.
You
see, that onefourth
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 threefourths
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
millionandahalfdollar
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.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
3

AmericanRhetoric.com

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 povertystricken
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 30odd
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.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
4

AmericanRhetoric.com

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 dogooders,
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 nonearning
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.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
5

AmericanRhetoric.com

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 twothirds
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 overplanted
his rice allotment. The
government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960acre
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, sixtimes
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.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
6

AmericanRhetoric.com

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
triggerhappy
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 profitsharing
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 exGI
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 suchandsuch,"
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 splitsecond
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 19yearold
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."

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
7

AmericanRhetoric.com

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 wellmeaning
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.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
8

AmericanRhetoric.com

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.

Thank you
very much.

Transcription by
Michael
E. Eidenmuller. Property
of AmericanRhetoric.com. . Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Page
9