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Speeches - Governor Reagan - One Time Only (not indexed by subject), 1969/1974 (3 of 3)
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Speeches - Governor Reagan - One Time Only (not indexed by subject), 1969/1974 (3 of 3)
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Governor Ronald Reagan's Speeches
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Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
Digital Library Collections
This is a PDF of a folder from our textual collections.
Collection: Reagan, Ronald: Gubernatorial Papers,
1966-74: Press Unit
Folder Title: Speeches - Governor Reagan - One Time Only
(not indexed by subject), 1969/1974 (3 of 3)
Box: P20
To see more digitized collections visit:
https://reaganlibrary.gov/archives/digital-library
To see all Ronald Reagan Presidential Library inventories visit:
https://reaganlibrary.gov/document-collection
Contact a reference archivist at: [email protected]
Citation Guidelines: https://reaganlibrary.gov/citing
National Archives Catalogue: https://catalog.archives.gov/
Goldwater accolades
American business
Government encroachment -
loss of personal freedom
Bureaucracy
Land planning
Consumer protection
Inflation
Free Market
Social Security
Industrial Homestead Act
Employee stock ownership
12
REMARKS BY GOVERNOR RONALD REAGAN
YAF, SAN FRANCISCO
July 20, 1974
I hardly know what to say. Would you settle for just staying
here and we 11 just secede?
John, I haven't the words to thank you for a very warm and
flattering introduction. I have never been immortalized in song before.
To all of you, Ron, all the officers here, Bob, Cliff and our first
aid man, Stan. I have told some people before, Stan, that life not only
begins at forty so does lumbago, arthritis and a tendency to tell stories
To all of you, members and friends of YAF, it is an honor and a
pleasure, in fact it is a pleasure just to be away from Sacramento,
I thank you for offering me sanctuary.
About a year ago the legislature recessed and I had a little more
leisure than you usually have throughout the year and that's true at
this time. It was just about a year ago this time that Nancy and I
thought we would do something we had never done before - we took a
pack trip into the Sierras and I thought it would be quite a change from
what had been going on all year in Sacramento and it wasn't all that
different. There we were on a rocky, uphill road with a bunch of mules.
I welcome you to California, to this city here of ours on the Bay,
San Francisco. You know I have become a student of Greek history.
I have learned that there was an ancient Greek city-state that had a
custom that anyone who proposed a new law or program for government
did so with a noose around his neck standing on a chair with the other
end tied to a rope. If they liked the proposal he made they removed
the noose, if they didn't they removed the chair. I have developed
a morbid fascination for the customs of ancient Greece,
- 2 -
Now I know you didn't come here to listen to a politican tell
you about his troubles. You are absolutely right, so I am going to
talk about yours, which seems fair enough because a lot of your troubles
seem caused by people in my present line of work, I am honored
particularly because, if I understand correctly, you, in a way, dedicated
this convention, at least a portion of it, to observing the anniversary
of the Goldwater crusade. A decade has passed since Barry Goldwater
walked a lonely path across this land, speaking truths that needed to
be heard. His voice was raised trying to rekindle in our country all
the great ideals and principles that set our nation apart from all
others that preceded us. But louder and more strident voices uttered
easily sold cliches, cartoonists with acid-tipped pens ridiculed and
ranted. Barry Goldwater's unforgiveable sin ten years ago was simply
and honestly to speak his mind. He thought that free enterprise was in
danger from excessive government and he said so, He thought that some
Americans were too complacent about the threat of Communism and he said
so, just as he said that he thought Lyndon Johnson was backing us into
a full-scale war in Vietnam with no plan for ending it once it started.
Shortly after the 1964 election I am sure you have heard this one about
the young man who said "I was told that if I voted for Barry Goldwater
we would be in war in six months. I did and we are."
You know it is hard for anyone to pretend that he can recall any
remarks of Barry Goldwater that could be called inflammatory, Blunt,
yes; hard truth, yes; vicious or defamatory, no. But this could not be
said of his opponents, it is funny how easily there are some protectors
of civil rights who can ask "how dare you call someone a Communist,
you Fascist you?"
- 3 -
Ten years ago the Postmaster General said "we know what
Senator Goldwater is talking about extremism, his hate and divisiveness
It is spitting on the ambassador to the United Nations," A labor leader
drew a parallel between Goldwater and Hitler. The governor of California
said "the stench of Fascism is in the air." The National Democratic
Chairman said "the Republican platform of Goldwater is an exercise in
fantasy, fear and hate." The publisher of a paper that prints all the
news fit to print warned that the kind of backing that Goldwater had
was the kind of business backing behind the Nazis in the early 30s.
A national columnist pointed out that all the tyrants in history from
Caesar and Napoleonto Hitler and Stalin, acted in the name of liberty
and justice. All this and more was spewed forth because the man pledged
to support the Constitution of the United States felt called upon to
remind us that even a land as rich as ours can't go on forever borrowing
against the future, leaving a legacy of debt for another generation;
that inflation could reduce the standard of living for an entire
generation that had no part in the folly; that if young Americans were
asked to fight and die for their country it should be for a cause worth
winning and they should be allowed to win it as quickly as possible.
It is well for us to be reminded of the hate-filled rhetoric that
was spewed forth over such a long period of time about that pleasant,
patriotic and courageous man and how uncalled-for it seems now as we
look back.
Right now American business and industry are in the deepest trouble
they have ever been in in our Nation's entire history. A large percentage
of the people in this country today lay all their troubles at the door
of business. The word profit is synonymous with evil as with the term
"private property" and therefore personal freedom, freedom of choice for
everybody, is in danger. Profit, property and freedom are inseparable,
you can't have any one of them without the other two.
- 4 -
For a long time now we haven't been taught enough economics
in our schools and sometimes I am amazed at all of you, I don't know
how you have held out against what has been a consistent program of
indoctrination, particularly through our educational system, and how
you have avoided the economic illiteracy that is so widespread. The
result has been, however, that self-seeking demagogues have been able
to take advantage of this not of you but of those others. Investors,
workers and consumers have been divided to the point that we have
forgotten we are all vital components of something called free
enterprise, totally dependent upon each other. If the public's lack
of understanding is not soon corrected the public may soon do great
and irreparable harm to itself by demanding more interference than we
already have by government.
Government, as you know, in its answers to the problem, is somewhat
less than a howling success, particularly when government involves
itself in things that are not in its proper province. And we don't
have to talk theoretically, We could look, for example, to one of the
Iron Curtain countries where government is in complete charge. There
is nothing to interfere with its carrying out its dreams of regimentation
and regulation. In that country I am mentioning they had a simple
holiday problem not too long ago. They issued an edict and this was
intended to solve it. It said that because Christmas Eve falls on
Thursday, Thursday has been designated a Saturday for work purposes.
The factories will be closed all day with the stores open a half-day
only. So far that's not too bad, it works out all right, but there was
more to the edict. Friday has been designated a Sunday with all
factories and stores closed all day. Monday will be Wednesday for
work purposes, Wednesday will be a business Friday and Saturday will
be Sunday and Sunday will be Monday.
- 5 -
We, of course, say that's a Socialist country, that can't happen
here. Well, you have already heard John talk about our own Internal
Revenue Code, Let me give you just a few lines from that Internal
Revenue Code which is supposed to make your job easier along about
April. This is Section 509. It says "for purposes of Paragraph 3
an organization described in Paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an
organization described in Section 501c of Paragraphs 4, 5 and 6, which
would be described in Paragraph 2 if it were an organization described
in Paragraph 3."
We live in the only country in the World where it takes more
intelligence just to figure out your income tax than it does to earn
the income.
The essence of the American Revolution was a system that produced
a limited government and the ultimate in individual freedom consistent
with an orderly society, and free men were released to perform such
miracles of invention, construction and production as the World had
never seen. One half of all the economic activity in the entire history
of mankind has taken place in these two centuries under American
auspices. Our system of free enterprise sparkplugged by the hope of
economic reward has lifted more burdens from the backs of more people
than any other system the world has ever known. Ninety five percent of
our families have a minimum daily intake of nutrients, 99 percent have
gas or electric appliances in their kitchens, 96 percent of the homes
have television, we own 120,000,000 automobiles and trucks and we have
shared our wealth more widely among our people than has ever been done
in any society. We have more churches, more libraries supported with
voluntary contributions, more symphonies, operas, non-profit theaters,
and publish more books than all the rest of the World put together.
- 6 -
More than a third of all the young people in the World getting a college
education are getting it in America, We have more doctors and hospitals
in proportion to population and we have produced most of the major
medicines in the last four decades. And still a great many people have
lost faith in our economic system and for that matter we have lost
faith in ourselves. Organized labor asks of government things which
it should be negotiating with management at the bargaining table.
Yes, management increasingly asks government for legislation which, in
effect, waters down the competition at the marketplace. In the marble
halls of government plans go on for ever more tinkering in involvement
with our private lives. Our traditional concept of states' rights and
local autonomy has been distorted, but much worse the people's relationship
with government has been dramatically altered. I think something that
illustrates this is a story that appeared in a column in an Eastern
newspaper not too long ago, It had to do with a welfare recipient who
had a part-time job on a farm. One day he yielded to temptation and
stole a smoked ham out of the farmer's smokehouse. He took it to the
grocer and sold it to him for $27. Then he took $20 of the $27 and
bought $80 worth of food stamps which he was eligible to do by virtue
of being on welfare. Then he took $29 worth of foodstamps and bought
the ham back. He put the ham back in the smokehouse and he bought $51
worth of groceries. Then, the columnist said, the grocer had made a
profit, the farmer had his ham back, the welfare recipient ended up with
$7 in cash and $51 in groceries, with no one being the loser.
Government programs multiplying like spores of a fungus have brought
an inflation that robs our people of their dream of a good life, As the
average worker increases his earnings to keep pace with inflation (which
he does because in a recent period of years in which the cost of living
has gone up 25 percent wages have gone up 35 percent),
he moves up
- 7 -
through our progressive tax system and in that same period has had a
65 percent increase in his share of the taxes, It is no wonder that
our people are in their season of discontent. A variety of polls are
worth a study. For example, the overwhelming majority in America today
blames excessive business profits for their discontent. The profits,
they estimate, run at about 28 percent. Further down in the poll they
are asked what they think they should be and they answer that they
think business should be happy with 10 percent. Business would be
ecstatic with 10 percent because for the last 25 years profits have
run between 4 and 5 percent in the nation as a whole. Another poll
was directed at 35,000 students on more than 2,000 campuses and we
find that three fourths of the students who responded and a higher
percentage of the faculty, blamed American business for every social
and economic problem we face. Three fourths of these students firmly
believed that the answer lies in complete regimentation of business by
government and they also believe that government can do this without
endangering individual freedom. And then, in the same poll, 80 percent of
them said they also wanted less government interference in their private
lives.
One more poll and this one perhaps, more than most, gives a clue
to our problem. More Americans than at any previous time in history, 69
percent, are angry about the cost of government and want something done
about the present tax burden, but less than one half of them in that
/of
poll could name their United States Congressman and those who could,
86 percent of them did not know a single thing he stood for.
Government by the people only works if the people work at it.
- 8 -
Now in this audience I am not going to ask for a show of hands
of how many don't know who their Congressman is, But seriously, the
business and industrial community must become thoroughly familiar with
the governmental process and you can help in this educational process
because I think they are ready. I have talked on this same subject
in the last 24 hours to an audience of some of the most distinguished
business leaders in America and I am not talking about the governmental
process, the text book theory of how it is supposed to work. Let me
illustrate two weeks ago the House of Representatives voted down
the federal land planning bill in squeak of 211 to 204. I am pleased
to say that our California congressional delegation led the charge and
one of the most articulate spokesmen in the fight on the floor is with
us here tonight, Congressman John Rousselot. Now there are some people
in thiscountry who accepted the land planning bill as an environmental
protection bill and there are others most of them who were not
aware that such a bill was even before Congress. The truth is, that
bill was a threat to the entire traditional concept of private ownership
of land, a threat greater than anything that has ever been proposed in
these 200 years and that fact was not understood by some of the
Congressmen who voted for it. Indeed, at the Governors' Conference in
Seattle some time ago before it was defeated several Congressmen stoutly
defended it as nothing more than suggested guidelines for states and
local governments to help them in their local zoning and planning.
When several of us expressed concern at that Conference that the suggeste
guidelines would become a federal mandate there were protests that
it was not the intent of Congress. Then one Congressman revealed,
whether he knew it or not, that our fears were justified, He said
"of course you realize that once it is passed we have no way of
controlling it when it then goes into a bureau or agency of government
that will implement it" and that's what we hade been trying to tell them
all the time
- 9 -
All such legislation, John well knows, has to contain a little
line that says the agency or bureau entrusted with implementing this
program shall make such regulations as are necessary for its
implementation. And so we are governed by an ever-increasing bureaucracy
made up of people who were never elected to office and can't be removed
from office by the voters. Regulations are spawned in the multitudes.
Titles alone in the federal registry take almost as many pages as the
Encyclopedia Britannica. Even some of our elected representatives who
contributed to this situation have now become alarmed. Senator Gaylord
Nelson of Wisconsin has declared that government has grown so big the
citizen can't deal with the endless red tape and inconsiderate bureaucrats
So, with hope, you think he is going to do something to reduce the
size of government? No, he has introduced a measure that is going to
create another bureau that will help the citizen find his way through
the other bureaus. It will begin with 10 regional boards and will have
hundreds of local advisory boards and that's just to start with.
Congresswoman Edith Green I think could fairly be described as a
liberal Congresswoman, from Oregon, However, her committee, concerned
with education, has been investigating to find out why after more than
$50 billion a year in aid to education from the federal level little
Johnny still can't read. So she has described what she found when she
started investigating, she said it was "complete chaos administered by
a huge administrative apparatus that was operated out of public view
and beyond public control." This is where we must begin the fight back
if free enterprise and freedom itself is to survive.
Since government began keeping records in 1892 industrial productivit
has doubled every 25 years. There is no record of government's
productivity and that's too bad because if the federal government
could only increase its productivity 3 percent you and I would save
$12 billion a year.
- 10 -
But government goes on spending $15 billion just to handle the
paperwork that it forces on American business, That paperwork costs
American business 130,000,000 man hours and $50 billion a year.
A few years ago one leading drug firm had to submit 70 pages of data
to the federal drug administration to get a new drug license. Today
it takes 70,000 pages of data carried over to the agency by truck
and then it takes them more than three years to wade through this
and finally give the license. It is very doubtful, and I mean this
seriously, if penicillin was discovered today that it could be licensed
by the Federal Drug Administration.
Do you remember that fuss a couple of years ago about the cyclamates?
You remember the businessmen who had to take those bottles off their
shelves, companies that had to take it back, companies literally put
out of business? Well now the FDA has admitted they think they acted
a little hastily. It is possible it wasn't quite the threat theythought.
The entire action was based on an experiment in which 20 rats were fed
cyclamates. Three of them developed suspected malignant tumors of the
bladder but the 20 rats had been fed an amount of cyclamates that would
have required a human being to drink 875 bottles of soft drink a day.
Government subsidizes $4 billion worth of research but it doesn't
know it is being done, how many projects there are or what they are.
I can tell you about one of them, It is called the Demography of
Happiness and after some time of research they learned that people
who earn more are happier than people who earn less. Stan, you can
listen to this part, the young are happier than the old, the well are
happier than the sick. Now it wasn't a really big project but still
it was $249,000 to find out that it is better to be rich, young and healthy
than poor, old and sick.
mygets 11 -
There is a bill now before Congress that has grown out of the
oil shortage. It will give the government, if it passes, the authority
to place a public and a government member on the board of every oil
company. Now if that passes how long before it spreads to other
industries? Of course, the old perennial National Health Service,
socialized medicine, is before Congress. Does anyone truly believe
that we can socialize the doctor without socializing the patient?
The Senate has passed a bill that would require manufacturers of radios
that cost $15 or more to provide those radios with both an FM and AM
band; it doesn't matter what the customer wants, that's what he's got
to get and from the fertile mind of young Mr. Nader (how come you
haven't given him an honorary membership?) has come a measure that has
already passed the House and it is now before the Senate. It will
create a giant consumer agency with a power to supersede every other
regulatory agency in government and with virtually unlimited authority
to set standards for everything produced and sold in this country.
Supporters of this blatant big brother meddling in our private lives
have already picketed and demonstrated in front of the few businesses
that have had the temerity to speak out against it. Not only will this
protection
consumer
agency have the power to interfere with the
proceedings of virtually every business and government agency in the
country. There is one exception, they exempted organized labor from
their attentions, but it will have the authority to compel other
agencies and individuals to divulge confidential information. It will
have the authority to publish such information and it can force business
to divulge trade secrets and make those public, Daniel Webster was
right when he said "every generation there are those who want to rule
well but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters but they
mean to be masters. II
- 12 -
May I tell you with all the conviction I possess after these
several years' experience, you have only heard the beginning of the
campaign to charge business in general with conspiring to bring about
material shortages, inflation, unemployment in order to reap windfall
profits at the expense of the consumer and the worker. You can expect
a barrage of bills, both from the state legislatures and from the
Congress, aimed at great controls and more taxes which business will
be forced to collect but which the customer will eventually pay in
the price of the product. Let me tell you the greatest weakness I think
of our resistance to these measures. We still have a tendency when we
win one, like the land planning bill, to sit back and say "well, that's
over with, we licked that one. " The other side has just had a temporary
setback, they go around looking for another door that's unlocked.
This particular measure, John, I am sure, agrees, will probably turn up
as an amendment on some fail-safe bill that everyone wants so badly
that they will go ahead and pass it no matter what is hung on to it,
But, whatever method they use, be prepared to keep on fighting because
it won't go away, nor will any of the other restrictive proposals.
Galbraith
John Kenneth
has written the declaration of policy for all
who have renounced the free marketplace. In his latest volume
"ECONOMICS AND THE PUBLIC PURPOSE" he asserts that the market arrangements
of our economy have given us inadequate housing, terrible mass transit,
poor health care, etc., etc. and socialism is inevitable. I believe
this is the first time that Mr.
Galbraith
in his talk of the affluent
society, has finally come out in his declaration and admitted that
socialism is what he has in mind. Now his so-called facts are outrageous
fairy tales to justify his zeal for government planning to the 'nth
degree. What do we do? Well, first we recognize that we don't have
to tell fairy tales. The facts are on the side of free enterprise.
- 13 -
We have a classic case forcomparison. We have a great country
of great space, of hard-working people. The utopian society that
50 years of complete unbridled socialism brought to the Soviet Union
and we could equal it, we would have to tear down three quarters of
the homes, rip up 14 out of 15 miles of highways, scrap 90 percent of
our automobiles, tear up two thirds of the railroad tracks and then
find a capitalist country willing to provide food for our people.
We've got to have the confidence, that the people can understand
if they are given access to the facts, Ignorance is the only thing
we have to fear, ignorance that permits the modern day populace to
gain a following for their philosophy of redistribution. We have
to communicate not just with each other, we have to communicate with
the people who are the customers and with the people who are the
laborers, the workers. There has been too much horizontal communicating
in which we talk to each other. We've got to start communicating
vertically, breaking into other groups that we are not now reaching.
Then we must recognize that an assault on one particular industry is
an assault on all. We must help with businessmen and make them under-
stand that they can't sit back and say "that's the oil company they are
talking about with that legislation; that doesn't affect me, I've got
a shoe factory. We have to make them understand we are all in the
same boat together and we wait until it is aimed expressly at just
one particular segment before we start fighting back, then we are
really in trouble because the ongoing struggle is for survival of the
free market system. So far we have been fighting a kind of a defensive,
rear guard action. Step by step we have retreated much farther than we
know. Too many people blame business for inflation and look to
government for the answer. Now that should be reversed. What if we
can make more people see that government's deficit spending caused
- 14 -
inflation by creating extra money for which there were no extra goods
to match, that inflation cannot be arrested by controlling the price
at the end product, it must be moved from the cost of production?
Perhaps we can also make them see that inflation cannot be instantly
arrested without causing a terrible untold disruption, but it can be
controlled over a prescribed period by some common sense actions,
including a reduction in government spending.
The policy of redistribution of the output of an economy that's
already too small is based on the fallacy that we can eliminate poverty
by giving everyone more money, higher wages, bigger welfare checks,
to
pensions and social security and increased unemployment insurance. increase
the purchasing power. The fact is we can only live better by producing
more goods and services for each other, Money is no good if there is
nothing there to buy. For too long a time our belief in jobs for
everyone as the answer at the same time that we keep negotiating higher
pay for a lower output has only contributed to inflation. I have
addressed citizens groups like yourselves on a number of occasions,
business groups as I did the other day *** yesterday and I have urged
a more aggressive policy of fighting government harassment, opposing
the status and the collectivists who would replace the free market
with a planned economy. Taking the case to the public I have suggested
a top summit meeting. Let the heads of industry and business in America
ask for a meeting with the heads of the communications media to see if
they are truly aware that you can't have a free press unless you have a
free economy at the same time.
I reiterate all these suggestions but of late I have been wondering
if there is not something more that would put us on the offensive.
Is it enough to fight the stupidity of the Karl Marx theory by talking
the free market theory? Have we neglected the most potent weapon in our
arsenal, the use of free enterprise itself in behalf of a broader cross
Mm 15 -
section of our citizens? We are beset by vexing problems and we can't
deny the problems result from government action but to complain as I
have been doing here tonight and then wait for the same government that
created the problem in the first place to do an about-face and come up
with a solution is a little fruitless. Businessand the industrial
sector nationwide is a pool of genius and talent and managerial
expertise that is without limit. What if we could convince that
business and industrial leadership of the country, under a kind of
noblesse oblige, to set out to find the answers to some of the more
threatening problems? You can't lick something with nothing, just to
complain that the answer is wrong. If the problem really doesn't
exist that the government program was spawned for, all right get rid
of the program, but if there really is a problem, and we have many in
this country, it isn't enough to say to government "you have passed a
bad program to deal with this." But we must go to them and say "we've
got a better idea". Take Social Security for a starter, most of them
are scared to even mention it, but it is about as potent right now and
destructive a time bomb as we have ticking away at the foundations of
our free society. More than one half of the taxpayers pay more social
security than they do income tax. Peter Summers at the University of
California calls it the biggest single roadblock to the security of
the American wage earner. When it started the average citizen paid
about $3 for every hundred dollars he could save over and above taxes
and the cost of living. Today it is taking $84 of every $100 that he
can manage to save. If a private insurance company attempted to sell
a plan that cost so much and paid so little they would be put in jail.
Every American wage earner under 40 now, finally we have reached that
group, that group is paying more than twice as much as they can hope to
receive. The average worker today is losing some $200,000 that would be
if 16 -
his if the same amount could be invested in a private plan. As it is,
the worker under 40 today is getting the cheapest kind of term insurance
at anything from three to five times what would be the normal cost in
the private market. He is getting the cheapest and least useful
disability insurance and paying more than three times the cost in the
outside market. Worse, the ratio of earners to retirees is dropping
to the point that one day it can be one on one.
The simple fact is the United States Social Security system is
bankrupt. It has been bankrupt for 20 years but this has been concealed
by an 800 percent increase in the payroll tax without a matching increase
in benefits. Now politicians so far have provided no answers and you can
bet that the Social Security bureaucracy is pretending that if it doesn't
look the problem will go away. Unfortunately, when the roof falls in
it is going to fall on all of us.
Now it would be $600 billion to guarantee the present promises of
social security. Do we wait for disaster or do we work out a plan which
guarantees a payment -and this is the important thing guarantees at
payment for all of those who are depending on social security to see
them through their non-earning years? At the same time we find a plan
that will restore equity to the present-day worker, that under 40 worker
today. Some most distinguished economists say we can. They have
proposed a plan which would replace the present payroll tax with a
system of social security bonds and then pay the existing benefits from
a combination of bond revenues and the General Fund, but stop piling up
benefits for those who might want to opt out of the program.
We are not taking on a new debt, we already owe the $600 billion,
we would just be legitimizing it by publishing the bonds. Maintain
some of mandatory features. For example, require the worker to purchase
a certain percentage of social security bonds equal to a percentage of
income
17 I I
This is just one proposal, I am sure other possibilities exist.
In our resistance to what some of see as a creeping socialism we
have just theorized about the superiority of capitalism. Have we
really made capitalism work to prove these benefits can do everything
for everybody better than the promises of the populous of the socialists?
All they can offer with their system, if you analyze it, is to take from
the haves and give to the have-nots. That doesn't eliminate have-nots,
it just changes them around. But capitalism can work to make everyone
a "have". Some years ago a top Ford official was showing the late
Walter Reuther through the very automated plant in Cleveland, Ohio, and
he said to him jokingly, "Walter, you'll have a hard time collecting
union dues from these machines" and Walter said "you are going to
have more trouble trying to sell automobiles to them." Both of them
let it stop right there. There was a very logical answer to that,
the logical answer was that the owners of the machines could buy
automobiles and if you increase the numbers of owners you increase
the number of consumers.
Over hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act.
There was a wide distribution of land and they didn't confiscate
anyone's already privately owned land. They did not take from those
who owned to give to others who did not own. It set the pattern for
the American capitalistic system. We need an industrial Homestead Act.
There are business leaders today who are exploring this kind of modern
homestead plan. They range from government allowing the corporate tax
to go directly to the people, that 50 percent of the earnings of the
corporations that now is a tax to the government, some of them suggested
"why don't you distribute equally and equitably to the people to be
used as each individual chooses, rather than having it spent on their
behalf by bureaucrats?"
- 18 -
But it goes from that to a more sophisticated scheme that business
has been toying with, increasing the worker investment in corporate
America. I know that plans have been suggested in the past that all
had this flaw, they were based on making the present owners give up
some of their ownership to the non-owners. Now this isn't true of the
ideas that are being talked today. Very simply these business leaders
have come to the realization that it is time to formulate a plan to
accelerate the economic growth and production at the same time we
broaden the ownership of productive capital. The American dream has
always been to have a piece of the action. Income, you know, results
from only two things, it can result from capital or it can result from
labor. If the worker begins getting his income from both sources at
once he has a real stake in increasing production and increasing the
output. One such plan is based on financing future expansion in such
a way as to create a stock ownership for employees. It does not reduce
the holdings of the present owners, nor does it require the employees
to divert their own savings into stock purchases. This one plan, and
undoubtedly there are alternatives, utilizes an employee stock ownership
trust to purchase newly issued stock when a corporation needs new capital
for expansion. The trust acquires its funds by borrowing with a
guarantee from the corporation, from a commercial bank or other lending
institution. Over a ten-year period it is possible for $500 billion
of newly formed capital to be owned by individuals and families who today
have little or no hope of acquiring a vested interest in our capitalist
system. I could go into more details here and explain these things
but I know that a great many men are exploring these now in this country.
What better answer could we have to socialism? What an export item on
the World market. What argument could a foreign land have against a
corporation which made its "have-not"citizens into "haves"?
- 19 -
In short, I am suggesting that we face a choice between government
that has grown desperate, embarking on a course that leads to confiscation
and redistribution or using the great talentand expertise of the private
sector to spread legitimate capital participation in free enterprise
to those who now are only property-less employees,
8
In 1808 Senator Hill said "I do not dread industrial corporations
as instruments of power to destroy this country but one corporation we
may well all dread; that corporation is the federal government. If this
great, ambitious, ever-growing corporation become oppressive who shall
check it? If it become unjust who shall trust it? Watch and guard
with sleepless dread that corporation which can make all property
and rights, all states and people, all liberty and hope its playthings
in an hour, its victims forever."
Yesterday I told those distinguished business leaders and I will
tell you, even at your youthful age, whatever you do don't risk having
to face your children or your children's children some day when they
ask "where were you and what were you doing on the day that freedom
was lost?"
######
1972 Voter Mandate
Government encroachment -
loss of personal freedom
Inflation
Consumer Protection
National Health Insurance
Welfare
Surplus rebate
13
REMARKS BY GOVERNOR RONALD REAGAN
Bull Roast, Centerville, Maryland
August 24, 1974
Chairman Cox and Mr. Hofstetter, Senators Bell and Mathias,
Congressman Hogan, Mrs. Bauman, National Committee members and
you ladies and gentleman, and most of all the man who is being honored
here today, Bob Bauman, my very good friend. I am delighted and greatly
honored to participate in recognition of a young man I admire very much.
As a matter of fact I enjoyed his remarks to the extent that I could
have stayed over there all the afternoon and listened if he just wanted
to keep on talking. I am most grateful. His kind are all too few in
the halls of government, at a time when there is a great need for
everything he stands for.
Now, I said I was delighted to be here. I said that in spite of
the fact that these last few weeks have not exactly been the easiest
time to be making political speeches. Some time ago when I was invited
to come here and speak to you I put together what I thought was an
appropriate message, then in the swiftly moving events of the day I took
another look at it on the plane coming in here and decided it had been
written at a time and was now as inappropriate as the captain of the
Titanic saying "Never mind all that ice, it's for the party Saturday night
Looking out here at the number of you who are here I can assure you
I don't feel like the lady who, after church, had invited a number of
her fellow members home for a Sunday dinner and bustled about and got
the dinner ready, then as they sat down said to her four-year=old son
"Why don't you return thanks?" Bashfully he said "I don't know what to
say" and she said "Say what you've heard Mother say". Dutifully he
bowed his head and closed his eyes and say "Oh Lord, why did I invite
so many people here?" I know that I am speaking to an audience of
- 2 -
Democrats and Republicans and, I hope, some Independents. I don't
feel at all out of place because I spent most of my adult life in the
Democratic party, then I made a switch, and I think we are brought
together here today by some deeply held beliefs that we have in common,
beliefs that transcend party labels and beliefs which are the basis
of Bob Bauman's political philosophy and that philosophy is closely
akin to the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the great majority of
the American people. Those hopes and dreams are the issue of the 1974
campaign.
Now there are those who would have it otherwise. Social tinkerers
who, for forty years, have worked to alter the balance between the
various levels of government who succeeded in dramatically distorting
the relationship between the people and their government. Pursuing
their dream of a government-planned and run Utopia they have preferred
that we campaign on something different than we now will be discussing.
They have preferred that we campaign on a single issue, an issue of a
thing called "Watergate". The men and women who will determine the
quality of life in America for ourselves and our children would have
been chosen, if they had their way, with no references to where they
stood in the issues that confront us. The truth is they wanted no
reminder that their planned Utopia had been rejected by the people of
this country just two years ago. Never in the lifetime of any of us
have the issues in a national campaign been more defined than they were
in the election of 1972. Those who had worked in these last four decades
to redefine our national purpose we know are the people who hijacked
the Democratic Convention in Miami. We sat and watched on television
as long-time party stalwarts, members of the Democratic party who had
served faithfully true to the principles of Jefferson and Jackson, were
suddenly denied participation in their party's council and even barred
- 3 -
at times from entering the hall as delegates. Then in the name of
that party we were asked to take the final step into a welfare state.
There was, if they had their way, to be a confiscation of and re-
distribution of the earnings of our people on a scale never before
attempted in this land of free enterprise, with government planning
of our economy and our private lives. Well, the American people listened
and then in overwhelming numbers crossed or ignored party lines,
Democrats, Republicans and Independents rejected their invitation to
Utopia and voted their reaffirmation of all the basic values on which
this system has been built, voted for fiscal responsibility and the
right to determine their own destinies. And they repudiated big
government growing bigger, deficit spending, higher taxes and the
permissiveness which has led to fear of crime in our neighborhoods,
in our streets and in our homes. They said "Enough of social tinkering
and costly programs which we were promised would solve all the problems
of human misery." But the programs always failed and, of course, every
time they failed they were followed by more of the same. Only the new
programs cost more than the ones that failed before.
Now, this didn't stop them, they thrive on failure, if the programs
ever did succeed it would put them out of business. They believe in
government for government's sake. Like Dr. Parkinson's rat catcher
he said that government hires a rat catcher and the first thing you know
he becomes a rodent control officer. He has no intention of getting rid
of the rats, they have become his stock in trade.
You know, in these eight years that I have been governor I have
developed an affinity for the study of the ancient Greek city/state.
That all started when I found out that they had a custom that when
anybody suggested a new government program he did so with a noose around
his neck tied to a limb of a tree and standing on a chair. If they
- 4 -
/approved
of what he suggested they removed the noose and if they didn't they
removed the chair. I have had a morbid fascination for the customs of
ancient Greece for some time now.
Ours has been a system in this country in which we turned to
government only when it was absolutely necessary and our national purpose,
our national goal, was to reduce the need for government to the absolute
minimum consistent with an orderly society. But that hasn't been the
way things have turned in the last several years, in fact in the last
few decades. You take in the recent oil shortage we heard persistent
clamor for excessive controls, rationing and punitive taxes, when they
should have been offering incentives. They looked for scapegoats when
they should have been looking for oil. We didn't take their advice but
now the long lines at the gas stations are gone. Yes, we have a long-
range energy problem but the answer is not what they proposed that
government should go into the oil business. You know if they had it
might have turned out to be almost as efficient as the Post Office.
Then the Soviet Union recently fired new advanced nuclear missiles
down the Pacific range and they are developing a new nuclear submarine.
Those same voices tell us that the answer to that is we should cut our
defense budget and have more welfare, advocating something called the
"new economics". We have been told over recent decades that the
deliberately planned rate of inflation each year was necessary to
maintain prosperity. For some time it seemed to work but at the same
time there were many of us who were warning that inflation is like radio-
activity, it's cumulative, it piles up, then one day you find it is
not there in control it is out in the open, it's broken loose. Now it
is the greatest problem and the greatest threat to our national well being
- 5 -
There is no mystery about inflation. Inflation comes from one
cause and one alone. Inflation is caused when government spends more
money than government is taking in. Then when somebody proposes raising
taxes as a cure for inflation it is like telling a drunk another drink
will make him sober.
While I am mentioning taxes, we are hearing a lot of crocodile tears
are being shed over the tax structure. We are told it is riddled with
loopholes that benefit the well-to-do and penalize the poor. But the
present tax structure bears their trademark, not ours. If they really
mean they would like to reform it we'd be happy to help and we might begin
by simplifying it to the place where the average worker doesn't have to
hire legal advice to tell him how much he owes every year. After we
have done that we might have a very simple provision of the law that
says that any legislator who advocates a spending program has to
advocate a tax program to pay for it. We live in the only country in
the world where it takes more brains to figure out your income tax than
it does to earn the income.
The answer to inflation is a balanced budget and we don't wait for
the next one we start by reducing the present level of spending.
Balancing the budget is like protecting your virtue, you have to learn
to say "No". We have had almost a half century of experiments and we
have grown to the place in government that even the office of management
and budget in Washington knows how many bureaus, boards and commissions
and agencies there are, but all of them have the authority to adopt
regulations which have the power of law. The federal registry listing
them has almost as many pages as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Washington
is the only place in the world where a man can call the OEO and a
$30,000 a year executive will pick up the phone and say "Poverty here".
- 6 -
Small businessmen in America spend 130,000,000 man hours
a year filling out government forms. It adds $30 to $50 billion
to the cost of doing business and that means to the price you pay
for the products that are sold. Then government spends between $15
and $20 billion finding some place to stack all the paper.
Did you ever hear about that fellow in Washington in an office
with acres and acres of desks, one morning a fellow sitting back in
the corner with his head in his arm sobbing as if his heart would break?
They finally persuaded him to tell what was wrong it was the Bureau
of Indian Affairs---and he said "my Indian died."
There is a consulting chemist in New York who has five employees.
He has to fill out 37 reports for 12 different federal forms, 26 sets
of data for 9 different state agencies, 25 forms for 12 different city
departments and now he has just learned he has to fill out an
environmental impact statement, probably having to do with the over-use
of paper.
There is a fellow in California who has a business and OSHA jumped
on him. They informed him that he has to instal separate men's and
women's washrooms for his employees. He only had one employee and he's
married to her. At home they sleep in the same bed and use the same
bathroom.
Do you remember a couple of years ago when the federal drug
administration took out after cyclamates, you know the artificial
sweetener, and suddenly merchants found they had to pull all the soft
drinks off their shelves and plants closed up business because they
couldn't produce these any more and diabetics couldn't get the things
they needed? Well, now the federal drug administration has admitted
they think they moved too fast. They had conducted an experiment on
20 rats feeding them cyclamates and three of them got suspected bladder
- 7 -
tumors. This was the reason for all the furor and breaking all the
bottles of soft drinks. Now we discover that they had been feeding the
rats an amount of cyclamate that a human being to equal this would have
had to drink 875 bottles of soft drink a day.
The mandate of the people two years ago was against bigger and
bigger government, greater and greater costs accompanied by what Cicero
called "the arrogance of officialdom". Many candidates seeking office
today may pay lip service to reducing governmentsize and the tax
burden but don't let them get away with it, pin them down to where
they stand on specific measures. Where, for example, do they stand on
the Land Use bill? That was halted by a narrow vote in Congress a
few weeks ago but you see they never die, they never even fade away,
it has already surfaced again wearing a respectable hat of environmental
protection. It is, in fact, a threat to the entire traditional concept
of private ownership of property. We must make the administration aware
that we consider this contrary to the mandate of the people.
The House passed, sometime ago, and now the Senate considers the
creation of a giant Consumer Protection Agency with the power to
supersede all the other regulatory agencies of government. It would
have virtually unlimited authority to set standards for everything
produced and sold in this country, plus the power to compel other
agencies and individuals in government to divulge confidential information
about the citizens and it can force businesses to divulge their trade
secrets and it will have the authority to publish those and make them
public. Somehow consumerism it seems a little insulting to us that
the same demagogues who tell us that we are too stupid to be able to buy
a box of breakfast cereal by ourselves at the same time think we have
the intelligence to pick them to run our lives for us and there we won't
make any mistakes.
- 8 -
There is another bill in Congress. This one was born of the
energy shortage. It would allow the government to appoint two board
members to every oil company, one representing the public and one
representing government. Does anyone believe that it would stop there
with just one industry or would we set a pattern of government involvement
and interference in the management of all business?
Then there is the old perennial national health insurance.
Now there is no one denies that everyone in this country should be
entitled to medical care when it is needed but we have a right to ask
if anyone has established that there is a need for this kind of a program.
We live in the one country in the world where if youhave to get sick
this is the place to be. We have more doctors and hospitals in proportion
to population than any other country in the world. In England where
they have had nationalized health insurance for many years, a third if
their medical graduates leave the country and find some place else to
practice. Most of the major medical discoveries have been made here
in this country. This is the only country where 98 percent of the babies
are born in hospitals. In most of those other countries a woman can
only have a baby in a hospital if it is her first baby or if the doctor
says she is going to have some problem in childbirth, the rest are born
without even a doctor in attendance, only a midwife. One hundred and
eighty two million Americans have some kind of health insurance, 19 millio
are treated by Medicare, 20 million by Medicaid, 3 million get their
medical care from the military. If you add them up this is more than
the number of people in the country which means there is a little
duplication and some are getting service from more than one. Now,
there is no question that some citizens still fall through the cracks
of all these programs. For example, we need a program to protect
against catastrophic illness or injury, that kind that you read about
- 9 -
occasionally where someone is struck down and it is going to go on
for years for some member of the family and it averages costing in this
country, when it happens, $25 thousand a year. We need protection that
even the private insurance industry cannot provide for this but it only
happens to 100,000 people a year in this country. Surely we can solve
that problem without a compulsory health insurance program that forces
200 million people to participate. We call it, and I refer to it, as
National
Health
Insurance
it
is socialized medicine
and you can't
socialize the doctor without socializing the patient.
In 1972 the people repudiated the proposed family assistance plan
which would put millions of self-supporting citizens on a government dole
for the first time in our history. The people repudiated it but the
idea is alive and it is well in the marble halls of government and can
be expected to surface any day now. It will be offered as welfare
reform. It is welfare expansion at the expense of the working men and
women of this country. May I suggest that there is a successful welfare
reform that is already being implemented and functioning at considerable
savings to the taxpayers. Bob Bauman very kindly referred to one of our
experiences in California and I would like to tell about it.
I inherited a government that had been such a little brother to
big brother in Washington that every time Washington sneezed the
"Gesundeit" was heard in Sacramento. We were spending a million dollars
a day more than we were taking in, hiring 5,000 new employees every year
and adding them to the government payroll. And welfare we were the
welfare capitol of the world, we were increasing our welfare burden
40,000 cases a month. We set out to reform welfare, we had a task force
work for almost a year. They came in with a set of proposals for the
most comprehensive reform ever attempted in that area, in that field.
- 10 -
Our legislature refused to even allow me to present the proposed
reforms to them. That was like banning a book in Boston I took it
to the public everybody wanted to hear the speech that they didn't
want to hear. So finally public opinion prevailed, people's government
works if the people work at it. So we finally got them. In the fight,
however, they told us it would fail, it would increase the caseload,
it would dump the burden on the counties and the property taxes would
go up and we would end the year with a $700 million deficit, the truly
deserving would starve in the streets, and other than that they couldn't
find much wrong with it. Well, it has been three years and five months
since we started implementing the reform. We are no longer increasing
at 40,000 a month, we have almost 400,000 fewer people on welfare than
we had just three years ago.
In these three years property tax increase. 40 of our 58 counties
have reduced property taxes for two years in a row. The taxpayers have
been saved almost $2 billion and we have been able to raise welfare
grants for those who truly need them by 41 percent. I think you would
be happy to know that Cap Weinberger, the Secretary of Health, Education
and Welfare in Washington, has taken some of our people to Washington
to implement the same programs. They are travelling around persuading
other states to put these reforms into effect and last year the result,
for the first time in the history of welfare, the caseload nationally
went down. Forty seven percent of the decline was in California and the
rest was in those states which have already implemented those reforms.
Every point was resisted, in spite of the success efforts ranging from
legal action to legislation continued to be made trying to cancel out
every phase of those reforms. As a matter of fact, one of our reforms
was an experiment. We got a waiver from the federal government that
we could make able-bodied welfare recipients in 35 of our 58 counties
- 11 -
report and work for the community for their welfare grant. They have
legislation today at which they are trying to cancel that calling it
slave labor. The first year, or last year, 57,000 of those people
through that system were put into private enterprise jobs. This year
85,000 welfare recipients will find private enterprise jobs in California
as a result of the program.
I forgot about that $700 million deficit at the end of the year.
It turned out to be a $850 million surplus and last year we returned
it to the people in a one-time tax rebate. That wasn't as easy as it
sounds, one Senator told us that he considered that an unnecessary
expenditure of public funds. Giving back that much money in the face
of a hostile legislature is a little like getting between the hog and
the bucket, you get buffetted about a bit.
Seriously, we have been through some traumatic experiences for
more than a year and a half. In recent days we have seen a transfer of
authority unprecedented in our nation's history and yet it took place
with such orderliness that it must stand as a miracle in the eyes of the
world. A new President sits in the Oval Office, we have had a change
of administration but one thing remains the same government in our
land is by the consent of the people and the people, I believe, have
given the government a mandate which they expect to be implemented and
enforced. The voice of the doomcriers has been loud in our land lately,
trying to shake our faith in our ability to govern ourselves. Our sons
and daughters in too many classrooms throughout the country have been
told that ours is a sick society. Well, a sick society couldn't produce
the men who set foot on the moon or those other men who returned unbroken
and proud after years of savage torture and captivity in Vietnam.
- 12 -
It is time some voices were raised replying to the doom and
gloom criers. If you double our present troubles we are still better
off than any other people on earth. We live better and have more
freedom. With our material blessings has come compassion among our
people unmatched anywhere, we have shared our wealth more widely among
our people than in any other society ever known in the history of mankind.
We have more churches, more libraries, we support with voluntary
contributions, more symphonies, more operas and non-profit theaters,
and have published more books than all the rest of the world put together.
One third of all the young people in the world who are getting a college
education are getting it in the United States and all of this is in
spite of and not because of government social tinkering over the last
four decades.
Still Americans are in their time of discontent. Why not? Government
is taking 45 cents out of each dollar of income. The good life we have
earned and deserved now seems just out of reach and not through the
doing of any of our people. The government and the nation we have all
supported so loyally seems somehow to only know of our existence at
taxpaying time. We have heard much in these last few months of special
interest groups seeking special attention from government for their
particular problem. I would like to talk about a special interest group
one special interest group that hasn't had enough representation in
government
made up of a cross-section of Americans of every political
persuasion, every ethnic background, farmers, city folks, the shop keepers
and workers, the great host of unsung heroes who get up in the morning
send the kids to school and go to work, pay their bills, support their
church and charity and ask nothing of freedom but freedom itself and
very little of government except to be left alone.
13 I I
You only have to look around at each other and you are looking
at that special interest group. Demagogues tell them that they can
only have a bigger slice of the pie by reducing someone else's slice.
I think they need representatives in government like Bob Bauman who
know we can all have a bigger slice if government will get out of the
way and let the free enterprise system produce a bigger pie.
More than a hundred years ago a Frenchman came to this country
and for years after he wrote books. His name was de Tocqueville and I
guess every speaker quotes him from some time or the other but he said
something that is pretty pertinent to us right now after one of his
visits to America. He said "the political parties which I style great
are those which cling to principles more than to consequences, to
general and not to special cases, to ideas and not to men." I think
we have come to one of those moments in history when party labels are
less important than the preservation of the philosophical revolution
that took place in this land 200 years ago.
There have been other
revolutions but they just exchanged one set of rulers for another.
Ours established the preeminence of the individual for the first time
in the world's history, guaranteed freedom of choice and the right of
a man to first call on the fruit of his toil and the disposition of his
property. We have been warned time after time to be on guard against
government. It was said most eloquently back in 1878 by Senator Benjamin
Hill. He said "I do not dread industrial corporations as the instruments
of power to destroy this country but one corporation we may all dread
that corporation is the federal government. If this great ambitious,
ever-growing corporation become oppressive who shall check it? If it
become unjust who shall trust it? Watch and guard with sleepless dread
that corporation which can make all property and the rights of all
states and people, all liberty and hope, its plaything in an hour, its
- 14 -
victims forever."
This is the task that lies before us. We, ourselves, have got to
stop asking things of government that government was never intended
to deliver. We have got to start saying again to government "we want
the control of our own destiny and our own lives and in order to do
that we have to elect men such as those sitting on this platform,
women such as those who are here, Bob Bauman, who have that philosophy
and who have gone not to empire-build and seek power and build a great
government, but to preserve this system of government by the people.
Thank you very much.
######
TRANSCRIPT OF SPEECH BY GOVERNOR RONALD REAGAN
Alabama Congressman Jack Edwards' Fundraiser,
September 30, 1974, Mobile, Alabama
If you're wondering why I've come to campaign for a congressman in
Alabama, it's because this particular Californian believes that the size,
the power, and the cost of the federal government must be reduced for
the sake of the nation, and Congressmen like Jack Edwards give us a
better chance for having that happen.
Of course I have to say, Jack, that sometimes there is a bright
side to everything, and maybe government's extravagance has a bright
side. Can you imagine how miserable we would be if we were getting all
the government we're paying for.
I have wondered, though, at times what government would really be
like if they had to do business on a satisfaction or your money back
guarantee. But Washington, you know, is the only place in the world
where you can pick up a telephone, call the Office of Economic
Opportunity, and a fellow earning $30,000 a year will pick up the phone
at the other end and say, "Poverty here."
We've been bludgeoned for about a year and a half now with that
thing called Watergate. We've heard it, and heard it and heard it.
And the result has been that a great many people are turned off on
public affairs, on public life and politics. And they're not here
tonight. You're here because you're not turned off. But there are
a lot of people out there that have to be talked to people who, I
don't say they're angry or disgusted or anything of the kind---I think
that what has happened is a kind of emotional drain. They've just heard
politics for a year and a half, to the point that they are just satiated
want to
and want nothing to do with it. They don't/be involved. There is no
way for them not to be involved. And therefore those of you who are
and
here, and those of you who still care/are involved must communicate.
You must go out everyone of you knows someone, I'm sure--an acquaintance--
who has said, "Not me anymore; I've had it." But they have to be faced
and you have to convince them that won't work. Now, communication requires
not only a willing listener, but the person doing the communicating has
to know what they're saying and have a pretty direct message to be able
to succeed.
-1-
I heard a story about that kind of communication recently from a
friend of mine---Danny Villanueva. He used to place kick for the
Los Angeles Rams and later, the Dallas Cowboys. And one night he told
me he was having dinner with a young fellow and his wife--the fellow
played baseball with the Dodgers. He was over at their house--a young
couple they had a little baby the young wife bustling about getting
the dinner ready. The baby started to cry, and she said to her husband,
"Change the baby." And he said, "What do you mean, change the baby?
I'm a ballplayer; that's not my line of work." She turned around, put
her hands on her hips, and she communicated. She said, "Look, buster,
you lay the diaper out like a diamond, put second base on home plate,
put the baby's bottom on the pitcher's mound, hook up first and third,
slide home underneath, and if it starts to rain, the game aint called;
you start all over again."
But you who are here are still working at government by the people.
And you have to seek out those others I've talked about who say they're
just going to stand by and not get involved. There is no way not to be
involved. Either the people run politics, or the politicians are going
to run the people.
Now there are those in this land who had counted on avoiding the
issues in this campaign. They were going to run on that thing called
Watergate, probably because they know that the issues in this campaign
of 1974 are the same issues we had two years ago, in 1972, and there
are people in this country who didn't want us to be reminded of that
fact. Two years ago the American people faced a very great philosoph-
ical choice. Never in the memory of any one of us in the room have
the issues in a political campaign been more clearly defined than they
were, and never have Americans, in such overwhelming numbers, ignored
Party line and registered their belief in a political philosophy. The
score was 49 states to 1. And I don't know what the political science
books say, but that's a mandate in anyone's language.
For 40 years we've been having social tinkering that's distorted
the balance between the various levels of government, and worse than
that, the very relationship of the people to their government. And
the people delivered a mandate that was clear and unmistakable. It
was a mandate that many in Congress seem to have ignored. They go
right on with the plans to continue confiscating and redistributing
the people's earnings perpetuating the economic panaceas that stretch
-2-
all the way back in an unbroken parade of failures from the Great
Society back to the New Deal. Now there was no faulting the motive of
the people that produced those panaceas. They really intended to solve
the problems of human misery. But each time one of their programs
failed, it was followed by a bigger and more costly failure, and an
energetic and fiercely independent America has come dangerously close
to being the deadly, dull, docile welfare state. The people voted
their disapproval of this, opting for a return to the basic values on
which this nation has grown to greatness.
Now I joked a moment ago about Democrats. But let me be serious,
because I believe we're in one of those moments in history when
philosophy is more important than Party label. Millions of patriotic
Democrats made it plain two years ago, and today these Democrats must
realize, and if they don't they must be made to realize, that they
are totally out of step with those who highjacked their Party Convention
in Miami, and those who highjacked that convention are still in the
leadership position in control of that party. That leadership is deter-
mined to take that Party down the road where the true Jeffersonian
Democrat cannot follow and remain true to his principles. I think I
have some idea of where I speak because most of my adult life I was
a Democrat until I could no longer follow the course of that Party's
leadership. This was evident in the economic summit in Washington a
few days ago. We heard scornfully how leaders of the Senate and the
House, or we didn't hear scornfully, they scornfully rejected the idea
of a balanced budget, of reduced federal spending. They called it the
Old Time Religion economics and they said it wouldn't work. Well how
do they know. For 40 out of the last 44 years they've been experimenting
with something they called the New Economics which has brought us the
inflation we have today and which threatens the very existence of our
free enterprise system. The Old Time Religion economics, and, yes,
the spiritual Old Time Religion are the foundations of this nation and
we'd better get back to them darn quick before we find ourselves socially
reformed right into the dust bin of history along with all those other
civilizations that failed in the past.
-3-
But these people, of that McGovernite philosophy, fail to recognize
they should be cutting federal taxes, they should be cutting federal
spending, they should be cutting the bureaucracy, and, yes, they should
be cutting their own extravagances. You know, Tom Curtis, one of your
colleagues, Jack, said just a few weeks ago back in Missouri, that he
thought the Congress ought to cut its own salary until they balance the
budget, and then the salary could go back up to where it was supposed
to be. Well, with Watergate gone as an issue, our opponents, of course,
must face us on the regular issues, and naturally they've seized upon
the one that is the number one problem facing the nation today
inflation. And suddenly they would have us believe that it's our fault,
that suddenly we've just brought this about by magic in the last few
years. Well this is an easily-sold falsehood; it is not the truth.
Inflation is caused by one thing and one thing alone. Inflation comes
when government spends more money than government takes in. Now, when
government does this, government has to borrow and thus it competes with
the private borrowers for the available capital. And right now government
is choking off the flow of capital that is essential to the construction
industry, to people who would like to build homes, to business and indus-
try which needs capital to expand, and to provide jobs for our people.
The interest on the national debt is already $30 billion a year. And
recently they voted to extend the debt limit, and to spend and to borrow
more.
Now, there's no great secret about balancing a budget. Your con-
gressman knows how to do it. Balancing a budget is like protecting your
virtue; you have to learn to say "no". Then when we've balanced the
present budget we must start on the budget for '76, and for that one,
we should aim at a surplus so that we can start making payments on that
national debt.
Who can do this. The Democratic leadership, the present leadership
that I've just been speaking about? Well they've had a majority in both
houses of the Congress for 40 of these 44 years---the last 20 years un-
interrupted, and today when they tell us that they have the answer and
that we don't have the answer, what's to stop them from putting into
effect their answer. There isn't anything we could do to stop them if
at any time they wanted to solve any of these problems.
-4-
But in all these years they have practiced a policy, and this is
what seems to me very arrogant that today when they would blame some-
one else for inflation, they think that our memories are so short that
were not going to recall that all these years they have deliberately
planned an annual inflation rate telling us that it was necessary to
maintain prosperity. And in these same years, those of us who have
to bear that term "conservative" to describe our philosophy have said
it
won't work that inflation is like radioactivity; it's cumulative.
It piles up in the body and pretty soon it's out of control, and the
patient is very sick, indeed. And today, our body politic is very
sick indeed. But they call this obstructionism.
Let me give you a comparison between two periods in our recent
history. Back in the New Deal days, faced with a Depression, but
practicing the planned economy, the new economics, no fault with the
intention of trying to do good, between 1932 and 1937 the annual in-
flation rate was 7½ percent, and by 1938, there were 19 percent of the
work force of this nation unemployed. Then we had a term when Dwight
David Eisenhower became president. For one brief two-year period he
had a Congress in both Houses of his own persuasion. Federal employment
was reduced by 10 percent; the inflation rate was less than one-half of
one percent. Unemployment was less than four percent and real wages
were going up nine times as fast as the increase in the cost of living.
And yet today there are those who will tell us that we must have a tax
increase in order to cure inflation. That's like telling a drunk another
drink will sober him up. The same political double-talk applies to the
same campaign year crocodile tears were shed over the tax structure that
they've just discovered is riddled with loopholes benefitting the rich
at the expense of the poor. Well, who could stop them from changing it
if they wanted to. As a matter of fact we might like to help them.
The first suggestion that I would make would be to make the income tax
so simple that a working man wouldn't have to hire legal help every
year to tell him how much he owes the government. Another very simple
improvement might be that any legislator who proposes a spending measure
has to propose a tax bill at the same time to pay for it. And how com-
plicated would it be to take our progressive tax system and adjust the
various surtax brackets to the Cost of Living Index so that when a
working man gets an increase that only keeps pace with the cost of
living, he doesn't move up through a couple of tax brackets to find
-5-
out he's worse off than he was before he got the raise. They won't do
this, of course. The record proves it. The only way we're going to
a
get that kind of fiscal sanity is when you return/ congressman like Jack
Edwards to Washington, and when throughout the rest of the country we
can send others like him until we have a majority there that will do
what we know is right.
What we are hearing now are voices that want more and more government.
I have become a student of history and I have been very fascinated with
the story of an ancient city-state in Greece. They had a custom that
when anyone proposed a government program, he did so with a noose around
his neck tied to the limb of a tree standing on a chair. If they liked
his proposal, they removed the noose; if they didn't, they removed the
chair. And I have developed a morbid fascination with the customs of
ancient Greece.
Our government has grown to where not even the Office of Management
and Budget knows how many bureaus, boards, commissions and agencies there
are. But all of them have the power to make regulations, having the full
authority of law. The Federal Registry which lists these regulations has
almost as many pages as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Small businessmen,
and there will be heads nodding yes in the room when I say this, in America
spend a total of 130 million man-hours a year filling out government-
required paperwork. It adds $50 billion to the cost of doing business,
all of which turns up in the price of the product, and then the government
spends $15 billion a year finding a place to store all that paper. You
take the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 85 years it has accumulated
43 trillion railroad rate rulings with no index. I submit that no one
can make a case that the Interstate Commerce Commission is necessary and
should remain in existence. Indeed, the Congress should take a good look
at any number of agencies whose excessive regulations harass business and
industry and keep them from expanding to provide the goods and the
services our people need, as well as the jobs.
Oh my, what happens with government and those regulations. We have a
businessman in California small businessman they walked in on him one
day; they told him he had to suddenly install separate men's and women's
washrooms for his employees. He only has one employee. And at home
they sleep in the same bed and use the same bathroom they're married.
-6-
Do you remember that cyclamate scandal. A few years ago suddenly
cyclamates were bad for us---the artificial sweetener in the soft
drinks. Millions of dollars of soft drinks were pulled off the shelves,
and thrown into the gutter
millions of dollars of loss for the busi-
ness community because they were going to be dangerous to our health.
Never mind the people with diabetic problems who required artificial
sweeteners. Now the Federal Drug Administration sort of quietly has
just eased out the word that they might have acted a little hastily.
It seems that they were feeding 20 rats cyclamates. Three of them
developed tumors suspected of being malignant. But the amount of
cyclamates they were being fed would be the equivalent of a human being
drinking 875 bottles of that soft drink a day. I submit that without
the cyclamates, drinking 875 bottles of soft drink a day is dangerous
to your health.
They've got an agency in Washington
a
Bureau of Indian Affairs.
It's like so many of those others; they have acres and acres of desks,
rows and rows of people sitting at all the desks. One day they came
in and saw a fellow sitting way back in the corner at his desk, sitting
there with his head down on his arms, sobbing as if his heart would
break. They finally persuaded him to tell them what was wrong. He
said, "My Indian died."
The mandate of the American people two years was against bigger and
bigger government and greater and greater costs, accompanied by what
Cicero called the Arrogance of Officialdom. Now many candidates today
pay lip service to reducing government size, and the tax burden, and
there again, all those things, too. Well don't let them get away with
it. Make those who would serve in high place state clearly where they
stand philosophically, and what answers they would propose for the great
problems besetting us. How they feel about Watergate isn't good enough
when we're choosing people who will be making decisions that affect our
lives and the lives of our children for a great many years to come.
You know the record of your congressman; you don't have to listen to
promises and wonder whether they will be kept. His record is sound,
conservative principles, and efforts to reduce federal spending are up
there for everyone to see. He stands for extending personal freedom,
-7-
for curbing inflation, and for easing the tax burden. He would strengthen
the free enterprise system and lessen the power of government, and as you
have just been told, he has received for the fifth time in a row that
watch-dog-of-the-treasury award which means he has succeeded in fighting
against the increased cost of government.
Your congressman was very kind to me in his introduction, in telling
some of the things that we've done in California. I'll refer to them
again simply because I think we should know that this system that we've
talked about--this conservatism that we believe in--does work. When I
took over, I followed an administration that had been a little brother
to big brother in Washington for so long that everytime Washington
sneezed, the gesundheit was heard in Sacramento. The state was spending
a million dollars a day more than it was taking in. It was insolvent
and on the brink of bankruptcy. They were hiring, and had been hiring
for a number of years, more than 5,000 new employees a year, adding them
to the state payroll. We were the welfare capital of the world, as Jack
told you. Our caseload was soon going up at a rate of 40,000 additional
people a month. By January, when these eight years come to an end,
there will be the same number of employees there were eight years ago,
even though some departments have had a 66 percent workload increase be-
cause of our growth in population. The governor, whoever he is when he
takes office, will be the first governor in 22 years to inherit a balanced
budget and a $400 million surplus. Jack told you about the welfare and
correcting that welfare was a little harder. We had a few frustrating
years of making efforts to correct it, and finally we got another citizens'
committee, put them to work to dig into it and find out what we could do
when they came back with a recommendation for the most comprehensive re-
forms ever attempted. The democratic leadership in the Legislature,
similar to that other leadership I've been talking about, refused in an
unprecedented act to allow the Governor to appear before a joint session
and even present the program for their consideration. So we went over
their heads to the people. And when the people heard our story, they
proved that government by the people works if the people work at it.
Public opinion was built up to where they capitulated, but it wasn't easy.
They put up quite a fight. They told us the plan wouldn't work; the case-
load would increase; it would dump the burden on the counties; it would
increase the local property taxes; the needy would starve in the streets;
and we would have a $700 million deficit. Outside of that, they couldn't
-8-
find much wrong with what we wanted to do.
Well, that was just about 31/2 years ago, and as Jack told you, yes,
the welfare rolls are no longer increasing by that great amount; they're
still decreasing and we do have those 400,000 fewer people. He told you
also that the property taxes didn't go up; they've been going down for
two years in a row. And statewide the taxpayers did save that vast sum
of money. But we increased the grants to the truly needy by 41 percent.
Cap Weinberger, the secretary of HEW in Washington, has taken some of
our personnel there, and they're now going around the country showing
other states how to implement the same kind of reforms, and last year,
for the first time. in the history of welfare, the national caseload went
down also. It went down in those states that have implemented the reforms.
But the battle isn't over. They constantly introduce legislation now,
and
even though it's been passed--legislation to whittle away/to eliminate one
by one the reforms we passed. One of our reforms was an experiment. We
had to get federal permission. They wouldn't let us do a statewide exper-
iment but they gave us the right to take 35 of our counties--we had to
negotiate for that--we got 35 counties in which we were allowed to get
the counties and the cities and the villages and the communities to
come up with useful work projects for the communities that were not now
being performed. And then we were permitted to make able-bodied welfare
recipients report and work at those community work projects in return for
their welfare grants.
Last year in California we placed 76,000 welfare recipients into
private industry jobs and 47,000 of them found their way into those
private industry jobs by way of that community work project. And yet
last week, I had to veto a bill that would have cancelled this program
out charging that it was unjust and slave labor. Oh yes, the $700 million
deficit. That turned out to be an $850 million surplus and we gave it back
to the people in a one-time tax rebate.
Now that isn't as easy as Jack and I have made it sound. When you
approach the Legislature and suggest giving back $850 million to the tax-
payers, that is like getting between the hog and the bucket---one gets
buffeted about a bit. One senator said to me he considered giving the
money back an unnecessary expenditure of public funds. But I will give
them one thing; they never rest. You know, we make a fatal mistake if
we think when we win a victory of this kind that it's permanent. It's
like carrying a basket of kittens. As fast as you push the head of one
-9-
of them down when he's trying to get out, there are two more over here,
if you've ever had that experience.
We appointed a task force a year ago to look into our own welfare
reforms to see if there was anything else we had missed. And they
found out something else. They discovered a new target that was as
out of control today as welfare was a few years ago food stamps.
They have found fraud, abuse, administrative confusion, and counter-
feiting. And like so many other free (?) goodies, it started out as a
legitimate idea. It was to distribute an agricultural surplus to the
needy. There were 367,000 people then in the nation who were getting
these food stamps to the cost of $26 million. By next year, 16,000,000
will be getting them to the cost of $4billion. By 1977, one out of four
Americans 60,000,000- be eligible for food stamps, at what cost
we can only guess because the cost increases several times faster than
the increase in numbers.
What do you say to a man who calls you from another state and tells
you that he earns $100,000 a year, is sending his son to college in
California and what do we mean by giving his son food stamps. And we
have to tell him, that if his son asked for them under the regulations,
we can't refuse him. What do you say when you find out that a young lady
avoids the work requirement by being a half-time student at one of our
colleges and thus she's eligible for food stamps; she's studying to be
a witch. We called and checked to find out, and they said, "Yep, so
she's a witch on food stamps now."
Most of the recommendations that we've made will have to be under-
taken at the federal level, and I must say, that our conservative legis-
lators in Washington are prepared and are preparing legislation right
now to do this. The program first of all should be moved from the
Agriculture Department to HEW because it is a welfare program, and Earl
Butz agrees with this. The eligibility rules should be tightened so
that students supported by their parents aren't included. There should
be a minimum age requirement because believe it or not we have found
this is an actual fact youngsters, running away from home, join communes
and then the government subsidizes them by providing food stamps. Strikers
are receiving food stamps which puts government on one side of a labor
dispute when government should be a neutral referee, and we think that
should be prevented in the future.
-10-
And there must be greater protection against counterfeiting, or
even stealing. They are as negotiable as currency. And right now
they're delivered in a manner as if they're wastepaper. But, also,
in Los Angeles just recently, we uncovered a multi-million dollar
counterfeiting ring counterfeiting not money, but food stamps.
Our congressional delegation, as I say, is enthusiastic about
this. Now I know one thing. A lot of taxpaying citizens are tired
of seeing an able-bodied fellow, well-dressed and seemingly alright,
standing in the checkout line of a supermarket ahead of them buying
whether
T-bone steaks with food stamps, and they're wondering/after they pay
their taxes they can afford hamburger.
You know, we've heard much in this last horrendous year and a
half about special interest groups seeking special attention from
government. Well, I'd like to call your attention to one special
interest group that hasn't had enough attention from government or
enough representation in government for too long a time. It's made
up of a cross-section of Americans of every political persuasion, of
every religion, of every race, of every ethnic background. They're
farmers and city folk; they're workers and shopkeepers, they're a great
host of people that some of the elite would like to refer to as the
masses of the common man. I prefer to think of them as a very uncommon
group of men and women unsung heroes who get up in the morning and
send the kids to school, who go to work, pay their bills, support their
church and charity. They ask nothing of freedom but freedom itself and
very little of government except to be safe in their homes and on their
streets.
great
Now, Jack Edwards is one that does represent that/group of unsung
heroes, and he knows that without them this whole system of ours would
long since come unglued. Right now they're in their time of discontent,
and why not. Government only seems to know of their existence at tax
collecting time and it's taking 45 cents out of every dollar that the
citizen earns. The good life that they've worked for and deserve seems
to be just out of reach. Capitalizing on their discontent are political
demagogues, crying gloom and doom, shaking their faith in themselves and
in this free system of ours. In all too many classrooms throughout the
nation, our sons and daughters are being told that ours is a sick
society, that it must be pulled down and rebuilt from the ground up.
Appealing to the worst in us, the demagogues tell us that we can have a
-11-
bigger slice of the pie only by taking away someone else's slice. Well,
it's time to answer the doomcriers and to silence the demagogues with
the facts, and the facts are on our side. A sick society couldn't produce
the men that have been put on the moon in these last few years. A sick
society did not produce those other men who returned to us a year and a
half ago after years of savage torture in captivity in Vietnam, and stepped
off those planes unbroken, proud, blessing their country and their God.
And we should be telling the demagogues right now we can all have a bigger
slice of pie if government will get out of the way and let the private
enterprise system build a bigger pie.
But what our people need to be told, also, today is: double our
troubles and we're still better off than any people anywhere else on
earth. We have more freedom; we have more material possessions; we
live better; and with our material blessings has come a compassion that
is unequalled by any other people in the world. We've shared our wealth
more widely among our people than any society in the history of mankind.
We have more churches, more libraries, we support with voluntary contri-
butions more symphonies, more operas, more non-profit theaters, and publish
more books than all the rest of the world put together. One-third of the
young people who are getting a college education in the world are getting
it in the United States, and I submit that all of this is in spite of and
not because of the social tinkering that's been going on for the last
four decades.
Now we can restore our people's faith in their own capacity for
greatness. We can convince our sons and daughters of how much there is
to really love in this land of ours. I think we have come to one of those
moments, as I said before, when history would reveal that philosophy is
more important than Party labels. We saw this a few weeks ago when your
Alabama senator, James Allen, led the fight against a bill called the
Consumer Protection Plan which was an all-out assault on our concept of
private enterprise. But with the Democratic Party today in the hands
of those that highjacked that convention two years ago, I think we, as
Republicans, must recognize that we are the vehicle; we are the ones who
can raise the banner around which all Americans--Democrats, Republicans
and Independents who want a free America--can rally. And to do this, we
-12-
have to counter some false imagery that's been created by a great many
of the radical Left in our midst that we're the party of the rich, that
we cater to powerful interests who seek special favors of government.
And here again, the truth is our weapon. For more than a quarter of a
century we've been unable to equal our opponents in campaign spending.
Seventy-five percent of our contributions come in gifts of $100 or less,
and we outnumber our opponents five to one in that kind of small
contributor. But you say, well that couldn't be true in 1972; we've
heard all about that and all the spending. Well, it's true that we did
spend on Republican candidates, on radio and television alone, $20 million
in the '72 campaign. Our opponents spent $34 million. Then there are
those dairy contributions- $577 thousand to Republican candidates,
$613 thousand to Democratic candidates. I've never been able to figure
out why a rich Republican is a fat cat and a rich Democrat is a public-
spirited philanthropist.
But you know, there is a man in our land today who has called for
a veto-proof Congress on behalf of the people he claims to represent.
He already claims that it is reported that he owns 230 congressmen and
57 senators a clear majority in both houses. And now he's willing to
spend tens and tens of millions of dollars to achieve a two-thirds
majority so that not even a presidential veto can stop him from getting
what he believes is best for the people of the United States. Well, I
don't believe that even the rank and file union membership of this
country wants one of their leaders or anyone else in this country to
have that kind of control over the government of the people of America.
The record proves that your candidate isn't in anyone's pocket.
He represents this district; he represents his state, and the reason
the Californian is here is because in so doing, he represents this
country the way it should be represented. And I hope and trust that he
will be back in Congress for a long time to come.
I suppose I could have summed all of this up in just one little
statement that was made by a Senator Hill in 1878. What it's really
all about and what the issue of this election is all about. He said,
"I do not dread industrial corporations as instruments of power to
destroy this country. But there is one corporation which we may all
well dread that corporation is the federal government. If this great,
-13-
ambitious, ever-growing corporation become oppressive, who shall check it.
If it become unjust, who shall trust it. Watch and guard with sleepless
dread that corporation which can make all property and the rights of all
states, people and all liberty and hope its plaything in an hour, its
victims forever."
Ladies and gentlemen, I must tell you we are much closer to seeing
a drastic change at what we have termed a free country than any of us
I think realize. It is later than we think. And so I say to all of you:
please communicate, please talk to those others who may think they're
going to sit out this election because it won't make very much difference.
Make people's government work. Send your congressman back there and then
do all you can to elect these other candidates to see that the philosophy
that we believe in and that has brought us here tonight is the philosophy
that guides America in the future. Thank you very much.
# # #
-14-
SPEECH BY GOVERNOR RONALD
CIVIC AUDITORIUM
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
APRIL 9, 1968
GOVERNOR CARGO, REVEREND CLERGY, MY FELLOW CURRES III' HERE or ThE PLATE-
FORM WHO HAVE NOW JUST LEARNED THE TRUTH, THAT THE HARDES" ""() PLAY
TN SHOW BUSINESS IS AN EATING SCENE (LAUGHTER). you HAVE WARMED MY
HEART, AND I CAN'T TELL you HOW GRATEFUL I AM FOP THIS MARM WELCOUP AUD
FOR YOUR KIND WORDS. I KNOW SOMETHING OF WHAT IT COST YOU TO COME HERF
AND HAVE THIS LUNCH. THE ONLY THING I CAN SAY ABOUT IT, IN THE WAY OF
NCOURAGEMENT, IS IF WE DON'T WIN, THAT'S GOING TO BE THE REGULAR PRICE
*R A BOX LUNCH. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
BY, DAVE, WHEN YOU SAID THAT I WAS A PROBLEM SOLVER, or COURSE, THAT'S
THE THING I GOT A LOT OF PRACTICE LATELY. I WAS FUMBLING THROUGH THE
PAPERS ON THE DESK ONE DAY, I THOUGHT THERE OUGHT TO EE A LETTER OF
RESIGNATION IN THERE SOME PLACE. SOMEBODY SAID TO ME, 'CHEEP UP, THINGS
COULD BE WORSE', so I CHEERED UP, AND SURE ENOUGH, THEY COT WORSE.
(LAUGHTER)
THERE IS A FELLOW ON THE RADIO IN SACRAMENTO, I DONMT KNOW VHO BE IS, Dum
THE OTHER MORNING I HEARD HIM ON THE CAR RADJO, AND HE SAID SOMETHING AND
I'LL LOVE HIM FOREVER. HE SAID 'EVERY MAN SHOULD TAKE A WIFE, BECAUSE
SOONER OR LATER SOMETHING IS BOUND TO HAPPEN THAT YOU CAN'T BLAME OF THE
GOVERNOR'S (LAUGHTER) I DON'T MEAN TO SOUND LIKE I AM COMPLAINING.
1 KNOW THIS MUST BE TRUE OF YOU, THE LETTERS THAT MEAN THE MOST OF ALL,
ARE THE ONES FROM THE KIDS, AND THEY COME IN, AND THERE WAS ONE THE OTHER
DAY FROM A LITTLE GIRL NAMED MARIE, AND SHE ASKED MY OPINION, SHE SAID:
'DO YOU THINK THE TEACHERS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO HIT US ON THE KNUCKLES
WITH A RULER?' SHE SAID: 'I DON'T THINK SO'. P.S., 'IF MY HANDWRITING
MV HAND TS SORE'.
(2)
LL, DO YOU REMEMBER BACK IN '64, ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ. NOW WE KNOW
AT HE MEANT. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE) THE CREDIBILITY GAP IS SO GREAT,
AT WE HAVE TO WORRY THAT MAYBE HE TOLD US THE TRUTH THE OTHER DAY
PING WE WOUDN'T BELIEVE HIM. (LAUGHTER) OF COURSE, WE STILL HAVE
BBY. YOU KNOW, IT JUST SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY THAT BOBBY WAS TELLING
$ THAT HE WANTED A JOHNSON-HUMPHREY TICKET. NOW WE KNOW WHERE TO.
LAUGHTER) THERE IS A LOT OF TALK THAT IF BOBBY SHOULD BECOME THE
ANDIDATE, WHO WOULD BE HIS RUNNING MATE. WELL, THAT'S KIND OF SILLY.
E WON'T HAVE ANY. WHO EVER HEARD OF A VICE-KENNEDY? (LAUGHTER) BUT,
OU CAN'T DENY BOBBY LOVES THE POOR, AND HE IS GOING TO DO HIS BEST TO
EEP US THAT WAY. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
ERE IT IS, ANOTHER ELECTION YEAR. THEY'VE GOTTEN OUT A HANDBOOK IN
HE OTHER PARTY, AND I'VE SEEN IT, AND THIS IS TRUE. IT'S FOR CAMPAIGNERS,
ND IT HAS ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CAMPAIGNING CANDIDATES IN THE
EMOCRATIC SIDE, AND AMONG ONE OF THE INSTRUCTIONS IS THAT THEY SHOULD
VERY CAREFUL IN THEIR CAMPAIGNING NOT TO LET FINANCE GET OUT OF HAND.
OT TO LET OUTGO EXCEED INCOME. NOW, IF THEY ONLY HAD A BOOK LIKE THAT
'OR THE OFFICE HOLDERS. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE) WE ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE
THE WORLD WHOSE MONEY CAN GO TO EUROPE AND WE CAN'T. (LAUGHTER AND
PPLAUSE) UNDER THE INCREASE IN THE POSTAGE RATES, WE CAN'T EVEN WRITE
TAKES THE COMBINED TAXES FOR FIVE (5) FAMILIES TO PAY THE COST OF THE
'EDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR ONE SECOND. DID YOU JUST BLINK YOUR EYES? WELL
EFORE YOU GOT THEM OPENED, THE GOVERNMENT HAD SPENT $4,550.00, BUT LIKE
IUBERT HERATIO HUMPHREY SAID, 1A BILLION HERE, AND A BILLION THERE, IT
UP'. (LAUGHTER) HUBERT, NOW THERE'S A MODEST MAN, (LAUGHTER) WITH
GREAT DEAL TO BE MODEST ABOUT. (LAUGHTER) HE APPROACHES EVERY PROBLEM
AN OPEN MOUTH. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
(3)
FOR DECADES, THE LEADERSHIP OF THAT PARTY HAS TRIED TO TAKE EVERY
PROBLEM AND MAKE IT THEIRS, AND THAT GOES FOR JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING
ELSE WE OWNED. LOOK HOW THEY HAVE BEEN SOLVING THE FARMERS PROBLEMS.
DO YOU REMEMBER THAT OLD GAQ, THAT GAG BASED ON DEFINITIONS?
SOCIALISM: THIS WAS IF YOU HAD TWO COWS, THEY TAKE ONE, AND THE
GOVERNMENT WOULD: GIVE IT TO YOUR NEIGHBOR. COMMUNISM: IF YOU HAD
TWO COWS THE GOVERNMENT WOULD TAKE BOTH OF THEM, AND GIVE YOU THE MILK.
WELL, OUR GOVERNMENT, THEY TAKE BOTH COWS, SHOOT ONE, MILK THE OTHER,
THROW THE MILK AWAY, AND BUY BUTTER FROM HOLLAND. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
THEIR IDEA OF HELPING THE FARMER IS TO BUY HIM A MILKING MACHINE, AND
THEN TAKE HIS ONLY COW IN PAYMENT OF TAXES.
IN 1920, YOU COULD TELEPHONE FROM NEW YORK TO SAN FRANCISCO FOR $20.75,
AND FOR THAT SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY YOU COULD SEND 1,037 LETTERS. NOW, IT
ONLY COSTS A DOLLAR TO MAKE THAT TELEPHONE CALL, AND FOR THAT AMOUNT YOU
CAN ONLY SEND 16 LETTERS. so, THE GOVERNMENT IS INVESTIGATING THE 'BELL
SYSTEM' (LAUGHTER) THEY ARE SPENDING $425,000.000 IN THE FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT ON PUBLIC RELATIONS, JUST TO TELL US HOW WELL OFF WE ARE.
NEVER HAVE so FEW, SPENT SO MUCH, TO TELL US SO LITTLE. CIVILIAN BUREAUS
ARE MULTIPLYING LIKE WIRE COAT HANGERS IN A CLOSET.
I REMEMBERED FOR THREE YEARS NOW, THIS ADMINISTRATION. DURING THIS THREE
YEARS THE PRESIDENT HAS ASKED CONGRESS FOR PASSAGE OF 1,057 PROPOSALS,
AND CONGRESS HAS ENACTED 655 OF THESE, MOST OF WHICH INCREASE THE SPENDING
OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. HEALTH AND WELFARE HAS INCREASED IN THESE
THREE YEARS 71%. THE AID TO EDUCATION 107.7%. HOUSING AND DEVELOPMENT
158.8% BUT, AT THE SAME TIME, THE PRESIDENT RECENTLY, PIOUSLY, TOLD US
THAT THE NATION COULD FACE A RETURN TO STRONG INFLATIONARY PRESSURES,
WHICH COULD ROB THE POOR AND THE ELDERLY, AND THE MILLIONS WHO ARE ON
[XED INCOMES. AND, THE IMPLICATION WAS, THAT WE WERE NOT NOW HAVING
NFLATION. WELL, TRAGICALLY AN ENTIRE GENERATION HAS GROWN TO ADULTHOOD
)T KNOWING ANYTHING ELSE. IN THIS YEAR ALONE, OUR MONEY WILL BUY
+ BILLION DOLLARS LESS THAN IT WOULD LAST YEAR. THE THOUSAND DOLLARS
HAT YOU, PERHAPS, HAVE IN THE BANK THAT'S EARNING $45 IN INTEREST, WELL,
JBTRACT $28.21 BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT IT WILL LOSE THIS YEAR IN PURCHASING
OWER. THE PRESIDENT SIGNED A CONGRESSIONAL RESOLUTION RECENTLY THAT
OULD REDUCE THE NUMBER OF FEDERAL EMPLOYEES IN THE GOVERNMENT BY 2%,
ND THEN WITH A CYNICISM, THAT IS ALL TOO PREVALENT IN GOVERNMENT TODAY,
ASKED IN HIS BUDGET FOR AN INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES OF
5,600., WE'RE FACED WITH A FISCAL CRISIS OF GREATER PROPORTIONS THAN
NYTHING WE HAVE KNOWN, SINCE THAT DARK FRIDAY IN OCTOBER OF 1929. BUT,
HOSE IN POWER, LACK THE COURAGE TO TAKE ANY OF THE STEPS THAT ARE
ECESSARY, LEST SOME OF THEM PROVE POLITICALLY UNPOPULAR. THEY GO THEIR
LISSFUL WAY. WE ARE TOLD THAT THE BUDGET IS AS PRUDENT AS THE
OVERNMENT COULD MAKE IT. DOWN TO BARE NECESSITIES, AND THE NEEDS OF
PEOPLE. AND, YET, THEY HAVE SPENT $249,000 IN A RESEARCH PROGRAM
ALLED THE DEMOGRAPHY OF HAPPINESS. THEY CONDUCTED THIS RESEARCH IN
UERTO RICO, WHICH WAS A GOOD PLACE TO FIND HAPPY PEOPLE, THEY HAVE NO
NCOME TAX THERE, AND WHAT DO YOU THINK WE GOT FOR OUR $249,000? WELL,
STUDY FINALLY CAME TO THE CONCLUSION, THAT PEOPLE WHO EARN MORE ARE
APPIER THAN PEOPLE WHO EARN LESS. (LAUGHTER) THAT THE YOUNG ARE HAPPIER
HAN THE OLD, AND THAT THE WELL AND HEALTHY ARE HAPPIER THAN THE SICK.
JOLIET, ILLINOIS AN IMIGRANT TO THIS COUNTRY, WHO HAD BECOME AN ADOPTED
ITIZEN DIED, AND IN HIS WILL, HE LEFT HIS WHOLE FORTUNE OF $170,000 TO
GOVERNMENT TO HELP PAY OFF THE DEBT. IN DUE TIME, A PROBATE COURT IN
LLINOIS PROCESSED THIS WILL, DEDUCTED $27,000 WHICH WAS THE STATE OF
LLINOIS' SHARE IN INHERITANCE TAX, AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS FIGHTING
HE CASE. AND, THE GOVERNMENT IS CLAIMING THEY ARE FIGHTING THE CASE,
WANTING THE $27,000, BECAUSE THEY CLAIM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS A
CHARITABLE INSTITUTION. (LAUGHTER) AND, THEY'VE GOT A GOOD CASE.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
MILLION AMERICANS ARE RECEIVING SOME FORM OF DIRECT PAYMENT FROM
OVERNMENT. EITHER DIRECTLY FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, OR FROM STATES
INDER FEDERAL FINANCE GRANTS. WELFARE PROGRAMS THAT NUMBERED 239 IN
964, NUMBER 458 NOW, AND WE'RE PROMISED MORE. INDEED, ONE WONDERS IF
'HE SCRIPT OF LAST WEEKS SURPRISING ANNOUNCEMENT HASN'T BEEN IN THE
WORKS FOR QUITE SOME TIME. BY A STRANGE COINCIDENCE, THERE IS A
:OVERNMENT PUBLICATION OUT, IT IS CALLED THE VICE-PRESIDENT'S HANDBOOK
'OR LOCAL OFFICIALS. IT'S PRINTED AT TAX PAYERS EXPENSE, BUT YOU CAN'T
,OOK AT THIS BOOK WITHOUT THINKING THAT HERE IS QUITE AN IMPRESSIVE
CAMPAIGN DOCUMENT. THE PRESIDENT IS DISMISSED IN THE BOOK WITH ONLY
ONE PICTURE. BUT, HUBERT HORATIO HUMPHREY IS ALL THROUGH THE BOOK,
HOTOGRAPHED USUALLY WITH HAPPY SMILING CHILDREN. THE FACT IS, THE
BOOK BEARS THE VICE-PRESIDENT'S SEAL, AND THE MESSAGE IS HAPPY, AND
INSUBTLE. THE ADMINISTRATION HAS 17 AND 1/2 BILLION DOLLARS TO SPREAD
ROUND THIS YEAR AMONG THE STATES, CITIES, AND LOCAL COMMUNITIES. ARE
OU GETTING YOUR SHARE? ARE YOU PASSING UP YOUR CUT BECAUSE OF IGNORANCE
PROCEDURES? AND THEN, IN THE FORWARD OF THE BOOK, THE VICE-PRESIDENT
EXPLAINS, HE'S YOUR MAN. HE GOES ON TO EXPLAIN THAT IF RED-TAPE GETS IN
'OUR WAY, DON'T BOTHER TO CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSMAN OR YOUR SENATOR, JUST
IN TOUCH WITH OLE HUBERT. HE'LL STRAIGHTEN IT OUT, AND SEE THAT YOU
THE MONEY.
N WASHINGTON, THE SLOGAN ONCE WAS "WALK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK",
IT'S "WALK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG SACK". (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
A LITTLE OVER A YEAR AGO, I INHERITED A GOVERNMENT IN CALIFORNIA THAT
HAD BEEN, FOR EIGHT YEARS, A LITTLE BROTHER TO BIG BROTHER IN
WASHINGTON. FOR ALL THAT TIME, WHEN WASHINGTON SNEEZED, THE GEZUNDTHEIT
COULD BE HEARD IN SACRAMENTO. (LAUGHTER) AND YOU KNOW, THERE WERE TIMES,
WHEN- I LOOKED AT WHAT I HAD INHERITED THAT I WASN'T SURE WHETHER I'D
BEEN ELECTED GOVERNOR, OR APPOINTED RECEIVER. (LAUGHTER) CALIFORNIA
RANKS THIRD IN THE NATION IN THE NUMBER OF THOSE WHO ARE POVERTY STRICKEN,
BUT NUMBER ONE IN THE AMOUNT OF FEDERAL POVERTY FUNDS THAT HAVE BEEN
ALLOCATED. BUT, IT DIDN'T ALLEVIATE POVERTY. IT CREATED AN ADMINISTRATIVE
NIGHTMARE. OVER THE LAST DECADE, WHILE WE'VE INCREASED OUR POPULATION
IN THAT STATE BY 39%, WE'VE INCREASED THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE GETTING
WELFARE BY 247%, AND THAT'S WHY, FOLLOWING THE WATTS RIOTS, WHEN MORE
FEDERAL MONEY WAS FUNNELED IN, A NATIONAL MAGAZINE DID A RESEARCH LATER,
AND FOUND OUT THAT SOME 50% OF THE TOTAL FUNDS HAD GONE TO THE
ADMINISTRATORS. THAT'S WHY, I ALSO DISCOVERED WHEN I WAS ELECTED THAT
I HAD A RIGHT, AS GOVERNOR, TO VETO SOME OF THE FEDERAL POVERTY PROGRAMS.
OF COURSE, BEING TOTALLY INEXPERIENCED, I' DIDN'T KNOW I WASN'T SUPPOSED
TO EXERCISE THAT VETO. (LAUGHTER) SO I DID. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
THERE WAS ONE PROGRAM IN FRESNO, THAT WAS TO TEACH AND SCHOOL DEMONSTRATORS
AND PICKETS. AND, IF THERE WAS ONE THING WE DIDN'T HAVE A SHORTAGE OF,
IT WAS DEMONSTRATORS. BUT, THE ONE THAT I DELIGHTED IN VETOING, WAS A
PROGRAM THAT AT FIRST GLANCE YOU WOULD THINK WAS RIGHT DOWN OUR ALLEY.
IT WAS A PROGRAM TO PUT THE HARD-CORE UNEMPLOYED, IN ONE OF OUR COUNTIES
TO WORK, CLEARING OPEN PARK LANDS. BUT, A LITTLE INVESTIGATION REVEALED
THERE WERE 17 OF THE HARD-CORE UNEMPLOYED, BUT MORE THAN HALF OF THE
BUDGET WAS GOING TO 7 ADMINISTRATORS TO MAKE SURE THAT THE 17 GOT TO
WORK ON TIME, AND THE PROGRAM ALSO CALLED FOR THE 17 HAVING TO TRAVEL
(7)
A TOTAL OF 12,000 MILES, AND THERE WAS NO PROVISION IN THE BUDGET FOR
THEIR SHELTER OR THEIR TRANSPORTATION. THE GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE
HAS DISCOVERED A JOB CORP TRAINING PROGRAM IN CALIFORNIA WITH 1,869
ENROLLEES, BUT WITH A STAFF OF 1,078. IT'S NO WONDER THAT IT IS COSTING
AN AVERAGE OF $50,000 FOR EVERY GRADUATE OF THIS PROGRAM. THIS ISN'T
PECULIAR TO CALIFORNIA. A CHICAGO ORGANIZATION WAS AWARDED $872,000
TO TEACH BASIC READING AND ARITHMETIC TO DROP-OUTS. IT'S A WORTHY
PURPOSE. A SHORT TIME AFTER THE SCHOOL WAS STARTED, A TRIBUNE REPORTER
WENT DOWN WITH A LOGICAL QUESTION, TO SEE HOW THEY WERE DOING, AND HE
INTERRUPTED A CRAP GAME. HE WAS INFORMED IT WAS RECESS. THE TEACHERS
PAY, HE LEARNED, WASN'T EXCESSIVE, BUT THEN NEITHER WAS THEIR WORK. TWO
OF THEM WERE IN JAIL, ONE CHARGED WITH MURDER, AND ONE CHARGED WITH
CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT MURDER. THREE WERE OUT ON BOND FOR WAITING TRIAL
FOR RAPE. ANOTHER WAS ON TRIAL FOR AGGRAVATED BATTERY, AND STILL ANOTHER
WAS ON PROBATION FOR A BURGLARY CONVICTION, AND THE DIRECTOR SAID IT WAS
TOO EARLY TO SAY WHETHER THE PROGRAM HAD BEEN SUCCESSFUL. (LAUGHTER) IN
ADDITION TO THEIR SALARY, THE TEACHERS WERE PAID $5.00 A HEAD FOR EVERY
DROP-OUT THEY BROUGHT IN, AND SINCE THEY WERE AUTHORIZED TO GIVE THE
DROP-OUTS $45.00 A WEEK PLUS A FAMILY ALLOWANCE, THE MOST FERTILE
RECRUITING GROUND WAS AT THE NEAREST SCHOOL, WHERE THEY WERE TALKING
THE KIDS INTO DROPPING OUT IN ORDER TO GET THAT KIND OF PAY.
IN NEW HAVEN, $27,000,000 HAS BEEN SPENT ON THE HOUSING, EDUCATION,
JOB TRAINING AND PLACEMENT, IN WHAT IS ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS OF THE
NATIONS ALL MODEL POVERTY PROGRAMS. BUT, THE DESERVING POOR, MOST OF
WHOM ARE NEGROES IN THAT COMMUNITY, DIDN'T GET WHAT THEY DESERVED.
PROBABLY BECAUSE THE DIRECTOR WAS GETTING $30,000, AND A DOZEN OTHERS
OF HIS STAFF WERE GETTING SALARIES RANGING FROM $12,000 TO $20,000.
HE ADMINISTRATIVE OVERHEAD HERE RAN TO 50%. THERE WERE 250 PHONES FOR
74 IN STAFF, THERE WERE 23 OFFICES THAT HAD BEEN VACANT FOR A YEAR, BUT
HE PHONES WERE STILL HOOKED UP IN THOSE OFFICES. YOU CAN GET AROUND
EW HAVEN IN 15 MINUTES, FROM PLOWED GROUND TO PLOWED GROUND, BUT THE
'RAVEL EXPENSES FOR THE STAFF WAS $161,000. NOW, ON THIS DAY OF TRAGEDY,
'HE CONGRESS WILL BE TOLD THAT SOMEHOW THE PROBLEM HAS FAILED OF
SOLUTION, BECAUSE NOT ENOUGH MONEY HAS BEEN APPLIED TO ITS SOLVING. AND,
THE CREDIBILITY BECOMES A MORALITY GAP, AND TOGETHER THEY FORM A
LEADERSHIP GAP ON A SCALE THAT WE'VE NEVER KNOWN, AND SHOULD NO LONGER
TOLERATE (APPLAUSE). WE HAVE GIVEN OF OUR TREASURE WITH A GENEROSITY
UNMATCHED IN ALL OF MAN'S HISTORY. WE'RE DESPISED ABROAD, AND THOSE
AT HOME WHOM WE SOUGHT TO HELP, SINK DEEPER INTO POVERTY BECAUSE THEY,
AND WE, HAVE BEEN THE VICTIMS OF POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM AND EXPEDIENCY.
WHATEVER YOU MAY THINK OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, WHETHER YOU APPROVED OR
DISAPPROVED, SOMETHING OF AMERICA IS BEING BURIED TODAY. (APPLAUSE)
IT BEGAN WITH OUR FIRST ACCEPTANCE OF COMPROMISE WITH THE LAW. ACCEPTANCE
OF THOSE WHO WOULD APPLY THE LAW UNEQUALLY BECAUSE OF RACE OR RELIGION,
AND ACCEPTANCE OF THOSE WHO ADVOCATE BREAKING THOSE LAWS, WITH WHICH THEY
ARE IN DISAGREEMENT. AND, IT INCLUDES THOSE WHO ARE IN GOVERNMENT. UNLESS
AND UNTIL THEY HAVE THE COURAGE TO SAY THAT THE LAW WILL BE ENFORCED
EQUALLY TO ALL, AT ALL TIMES, AND WITH NO EXCEPTIONS. (PROFUSE APPLAUSE)
IN THE LAST COUPLE OF WEEKS, I'VE BEEN TRAVELLING UP AND DOWN CALIFORNIA,
QUIETLY. NO PRESS NOTICE, AND NO FAN-FARE. I'VE BEEN MEETING WITH FINE
RESPONSIBLE CITIZENS IN OUR MINORITY COMMUNITIES. IN OUR NEGRO AREAS,
AND WITH THOSE FINE AMERICANS OF MEXICAN DESCENT, WHO MAKE UP SUCH A
PROPORTION OF OUR POPULATION THERE. IN CITY AFTER CITY, I'VE SEEN THESE
GOOD PEOPLE, WITH UNBELIEVABLE PATIENCE, OVERCOMING THEIR FRUSTRATIONS
AS PROGRAMS HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED WITH GREAT PROMISE, AND THEN DIE OF MIS-
IN AGEMENT OF THE KIND I'VE DESCRIBED, OR ON THE WHIM OF SOME
EAUCRAT IN THE DISTANT CAPITOL. AND, I'VE LEARNED IT FIRST-HAND
RCM THEM, BECAUSE I WENT TO LISTEN. HOW OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM HAS
LED THEM, HOW THEIR YOUNG ARE GRADUATED FROM CLASS TO CLASS, SIMPLY
BECAUSE THE YEAR IS ENDED, AND NOT ON ANY BASIS OF WHETHER THEY'VE
LEARNED WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO LEARN. AND, FINALLY, THEY ARE HANDED
A
MEANINGLESS DIPLOMA, AND THEY DON'T HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE TO GO WITH IT.
PLAUSE) I'VE LEARNED HOW OUR ECONOMY HAS NOT BEEN EXTENDED, OR
EXTENDED ITS BOUNTY TO ALL OF OUR CITIZENS WHO ARE WILLING TO TRY AND
WILLING TO WORK. I'VE LISTED TO THEIR HOPES AND THEIR HOPELESSNESS, AND
I'VE HEARD THEIR PLEA. AND, SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, IT ISN'T FOR MORE
WELFARE. IT'S FOR JOBS. IT ISN'T TO BUS THEIR PUPILS, THEIR STUDENTS,
EIR SONS AND DAUGHTERS TO OTHER SCHOOLS, IT IS INSTEAD, FOR GOOD
HOOLING AND DISCIPLINE IN THE SCHOOLS NEAR-AT-HAND WHERE THEIR
CHILDREN ARE ATTENDING. (APPLAUSE)
KNOW THAT I SPEAK IN A DEMOCRATIC STATE, AS TO THE MAJORITY OF
IROLLMENT IN PARTIES. BUT, LET ME MAKE IT PLAIN, AND I HOPE THAT IT IS
,AIN, THAT I AM SPEAKING OF THE LEADERSHIP IN THAT PARTY. I KNOW WHAT
MEANS TO CROSS-OVER, AND CROSS PARTY LINES, BECAUSE I SPENT MOST OF
Y
LIFE AS A DEMOCRAT. AND TO THOSE OF YOU WHO MAY BE TOYING WITH THE
DEA, EITHER OF CROSSING THE LINE AT THE BALLOT BOX, OR ACTUALLY RE-
EGISTERING, LET ME JUST INTERJECT NOW AND SAY. IF YOU HAVE ANY FEELING
F GUILT OR BETRAYAL AT LEAVING YOUR PARTY, AND I KNOW THAT FEELING, I
AD IT ALSO, THEN, RID YOURSELF OF THAT FEELING BECAUSE IT ISN'T THE
EMOCRATIC PARTY THAT YOU ARE LEAVING, THE LEADERSHIP OF THAT PARTY HAS
ONG SINCE LEFT YOU. (APPLAUSE) WE, AS REPUBLICANS, HAVE LET THE
OPPOSITION PARTY PREEMPT A WHOLE HUMITARIAN FIELD OF SUBSIDY OF OUR
F LOW HUMAN BEILGE, AND THEIR RECORD IS ONE OF COLOSSAL FAILURE. THEIR
UNDER THE SECOND AND THIRD GENERATION OF THE
WITY SHOULD THE REPUBLICANS HAVE GIVEN UP THIS FIELD TO THE ENEMY? WHY
SHOULDN'T WE STAND UP AND SAY THIS IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY, AND WE ARE
BETTER QUALIFIED TO ANSWER THE PROBLEM? IS NOT OUR PHILOSOPHY BASED
ON A BELIEF IN INDIVIDUAL MAN, HIS FREEDOM AND HIS RIGHTS? WELL, WE'RE
DEALING WITH INDIVIDUALS. THEY HAVE BEEN TRYING TO DEAL WITH THIS AS IF
THIS IS SOME GREAT FACELESS MASK OUT THERE. BUT, EACH ONE IS UNIQUE,
EACH ONE IS CRYING OUT IN HIS SOUL FOR HIS RIGHTFUL HERITAGE OF HUMAN
DIGNITY, AND THE RIGHT TO SHAPE HIS OWN DESTINY. HERE, WE HAVE A
CHANCE, AS REPUBLICANS, TO PROVE THAT WE ARE MORE THAN JUST NEGATIVE
CRITICS. OUR CHANCE TO PROVE THAT OURS IS THE WAY. THE WAVE OF THE
FUTURE. LET'S DO THIS NOT AS SOME CRASH EFFORT, BECAUSE WE FEAR A
LONG HOT SUMMER. LET'S DO IT, BECAUSE IT'S A GOOD THING TO DO. BECAUSE,
IT'S MORALLY RIGHT. (APPLAUSE) BUT, LET OUR PROMISE BE NOT OF SOME
INSTANT TOMORROW, SOME UNREACHABLE UTOPIA. LET'S MAKE OUR PROMISE
HONEST. THAT, WE CAN'T DO IT TOMORROW, WE CAN'T DO IT NEXT WEEK. IT'S
A LONG HARD ROAD, BUT WHAT WE WILL PROMISE, IS THAT WE WILL DO WHATEVER
HAS TO BE DONE TO SAVE HUMAN BEINGS, BUT WE'RE GOING TO STOP DESTROYING
THEM. (APPLAUSE)
I WAS IN WASHINGTON LAST WEEK WHEN THE BURNING AND THE LOOTING STARTED.
I WAS IN THAT MASSIVE TRAFFIC JAM AS THE GOVERNMENT LITERALLY CLOSED
DOWN, AND YOU COULD TASTE THE PANIC IN THE AIR. LATER, WHEN THE CURFEW
HAD CLEARED THE STREETS, WE DROVE TO THE AIRPORT THROUGH THE PALL OF
SMOKE THREADING OUR WAY THROUGH THE CROWDS OF LOOTERS, AND PASSING THE
COLUMNS OF TROOPS ON THEIR WAY. TROOPS ON THEIR WAY INTO THE BURNING
CAFITOL OF THE MOST POWERFUL NATION ON EARTH. AND, NO WHERE, WAS THE
HEY REFER TO US AND THE EVENTS OF THE LAST FEW DAYS AS PROVING THAT
E ARE INDEED A SICK SOCIETY. WELL, MANY OF US ARE SICK, WE'RE SICK
)F THAT KIND OF TALK FROM THOSE WHO TOOK OUR TREASURE, AND WHO DEPEND
)N US TO STAND BETWEEN THEM AND THE BARBARIANS WHO WOULD CROSS THEIR
BORDERS WITHIN THE HOUR, IF WE WITHDREW OUR MANTEL OF PROTECTION.
(PROFUSE APPLAUSE) WE'RE SICK OF THE SO-CALLED LEADERSHIP AT HOME,
THAT HAS LEFT THE SHIP-OF-STATE ADRIFT WITHOUT RUDDER OR COMPASS.
THERE HAS BEEN A CHANGE OF GUARD IN THE PENTAGON, THE REGIME OF ROBERT
McNAMARA ENDS AS IT BEGAN, WITH A WOE-BEGONE DEMONSTRATION OF MILITARY
INEPTITUDE. THE PLAY HAD A SEVEN YEAR RUN, BEGINNING WITH THE BAY-OF-PIGS,
AND CLOSING WITH THE HUMILIATING THEFT OF ONE OF OUR SHIPS, AND THE
KIDNAPPING OF 83 YOUNG AMERICANS, AND THE MURDER OF ONE OF THOSE. AND,
IN THE LAST, AS IN THE FIRST, THERE WAS A FOUNDERING OF PURPOSE, AND
THE LOSS OF NERVE, AND, AS HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE OF LATE, WITH THOSE
CLEVER MEN WHO PRESIDE OVER OUR MILITARY FORCES AND STRATEGY, THEY
CONGRATULATED THEMSELVES ON SIDE-STEPPING ANOTHER DECISION AND AVOIDING
ACTION. THE OFFICIAL EXPLANATION GIVEN FOR OUR INABILITY TO HAVE AIR
FORCE PROTECTION MOVE OUT IN SUPPORT OF DEFENSE OF THE PUEBLO, WAS THAT
ALL THE FIGHTERS ON ALERT IN KOREA ARE EQUIPPED ONLY FOR NUCLEAR
RETALIATION. BUT, HASN'T THAT BEEN THEIR MOST PERSISTENT CLAIM? THE
CLAIM OF THIS ADMINISTRATION THAT WE MOVED AT A COST OF FIVE HUNDRED
BILLION DOLLARS OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS, FROM A NUCLEAR FOOTING TO
ONE THAT WOULD AVOID THE THREAT OF THE BOMB, AND GIVE US A FLEXIBLE
RESPONSE? FLEXIBLE RESPONSE? WE'VE HAD NO RESPONSE AT ALL. OUR SHIP
HAS BEEN STOLEN, OUR YOUNG MEN KIDNAPPED, AND OUR GOVERNMENT ASSURED
US IT IS UPSET, STRONG LETTER FOLLOWS. GOVERNMENT'S ONLY EXCUSE FOR
BEING, IS TO GUARANTEE THE COLLECTIVE STRENGTH OF ALL, IN DEFENSE OF
(12)
EN ONE AMONG US, WHENEVER AND WHEREVER THE RIGHTS OF THAT ONE ARF.
IREATENED. (APPLAUSE)
E, AS REPUBLICANS, SHOULD READ THE MESSAGE OF THE WIND THAT'S BLOWING
CROSS THIS LAND, THE WIND THAT WAS BLOWING ON NOVEMBER 8TH OF '66,
AND IN THIS LAST YEAR'S ELECTION. MILLIONS OF AMERICANS, INDEPENDENTS,
DEMOCRATS, AND REPUBLICANS, VOTED AGAINST WHAT'S BEEN GOING ON. WORKING
MEN AND WOMEN HAVE DISCOVERED THAT THEY ARE NOT THE BENEFICIARIES OF THE
GREAT SOCIETY, THEY ARE PAYING FOR IT. THEY VOTED AGAINST TAXING
THEMSELVES TO PROVIDE MEDICAL CARE, AND THE STANDARD OF LIVING FOR OTHERS
THAT IS OFTEN MORE THAN THEY CAN AFFORD FOR THEIR OWN FAMILIES. THEY
VOTED AGAINST GOING DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO DEBT AS A NATION, WITH THE
IDEA THAT WE CAN AFFORD ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING, SIMPLY BECAUSE WF. THINK
OF IT. THEY REPUDIATED THE IDEA THAT THE GOVERNMENT MUST ALWAYS GROW
LARGER AND MORE COSTLY AND MORE POWERFUL, AND THEY VOTED AGAINST
CONTINUING AN EASY ATMOSPHERE OF PEACE AND PROSPERITY, WHILE SOME YOUNG
AMERICANS DIE EACH DAY IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM. THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS
OF AMERICANS, THOSE FORGOTTEN MEN AND WOMEN, WHO WORK AND SUPPORT THEIR
COMMUNITIES AND PAY FOR ALL THE SOCIAL TINKERING, ARE GROPING FOR AN
ANSWER TO THEIR DOUBTS, AND ARE SEEKING A CAUSE IN WHICH THEY CAN INVEST
THEIR IDEALISM AND THEIR ENERGY, AND THEY'RE NOT A SICK SOCIETY. THEY'RE
TOO SELF RELIANT TO SELL THEIR DREAMS OF THE FUTURE FOR THE DULL SECURITY
OF THE ANTI, AND THEY'VE BEEN TOO LONG WITHOUT REPRESENTATION IN THE
HIGHER ECHELONS OF GOVERNMENT. THEY BELIEVE IN THIS NATION, AS A NATION
UNDER GOD. THAT THEIR FREEDOM IS THEIRS BY DIVINE RIGHT, AND NOT BY
GOVERNMENT WHIM. THEY BELIEVE THE FUNCTION OF GOVERNMENT IS TO PROTECT
THEM FROM THE LAWBREAKER, AND NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. (APPLAUSE)
NOW, IF THIS WERE JUST AN ORDINARY ELECTION YEAR, POLITICS, AS USUAL,
JOULD INDICATE THAT OUR PARTY SHOULD TAKE POSITIONS THAT WERE NOT
)NATTRACTIVE FROM ANY VIEWPOINT. BUT, THERE IS A NEED IN THIS PARTICULAR
YEAR FOR STATESMANSHIP, AND STATESMANSHIP DEMANDS THAT WE FACE REALITY
WITH A FAITH IN THE PEOPLES WISDOM. THERE IS A MORALITY GAP, AS I SAID,
IN OUR LAND. A TENDENCY TO ACCEPT WRONG DOING IN HIGH PLACES, ALMOST
AS IF THOSE IN GOVERNMENT ARE NOT BOUND BY THE COMMONLY ACCEPTED RULES
OF CONDUCT, AND YOU AND I SEEMED TO HAVE LOST OUR CAPACITY FOR ANGER.
BELIEVE THE PEOPLE IN THIS LAND ARE CRYING OUT FOR A LEADERSHIP THAT
WILL SAY, NO PLACE IN THIS NATION SHALL THERE BE HIGHER STANDARDS OF
HONOR AND INTEGRITY, THAN IN THE HALLS OF GOVERNMENT. (APPLAUSE) WE'VE
REACHED A TURNING POINT IN TIME, THIS, NOW, IS OUR MOMENT OF DESTINY.
LET US, AS REPUBLICANS, RAISE A BANNER TO WHICH THE PEOPLE OF EVERY
PARTY CAN REPAIR. BUT, LET'S CHOOSE THE COLORS WELL, FOR THE PEOPLE
ARE NOT IN THE MOOD TO FOLLOW THE SICKLY PASTELS, THE CYNICAL SHADES OF
THOSE WHO WOULD BUY THE PEOPLES VOTES WITH THE PEOPLES MONEY. WILL WE
RESPOND WITH POLITICS, AS USUAL? OR, WILL BE RECOGNIZE THAT AS A NATION,
WE FACE OUR MOMENT OF TRUTH. THE TIME FOR BREAD AND CIRCUSES IS PAST.
IT'S TIME NOW, FOR GOVERNMENT. A GOVERNMENT THAT BELIEVES THAT ITS
RESPONSIBILITY IS TO PRESERVE THE VALUES THAT MADE THIS NATION GREAT.
TIME FOR GOVERNMENT TO USE ITS POWER TO PROTECT EVERY CITIZEN WHOSE
RIGHTS ARE DENIED, WHEREVER IN THE WORLD THAT CITIZEN MIGHT BE. TIME
FOR A GOVERNMENT THAT WILL OFFER THE HAND OF FRIENDSHIP TO EVERY NATION,
BUT NOT OUT OF FEAR. PEACE IS OUR PURPOSE, BUT WE WILL NEVER BE WITHOUT
THE STRENGTH TO PRESERVE THAT PEACE. (APPLAUSE) THAT WE'LL OFFER A
LEADERSHIP THAT WILL HAVE THE COURAGE TO TELL THE PEOPLE THE UNPLEASANT
FRUTH, WITH FAITH IN THEIR COURAGE, AND THEIR WILLINGNESS TO SUPPORT US
IN THE HARD DECISIONS THAT LIE AHEAD.
"LL STOP TRYING TO BUY THE WORLD'S AFFECTION, AND START EARNING 1""
SPECT. (PROFUSE APPLAUSE) AND, WE'LL PEAFFIRM OUR BELIEF THAT GOD
STENDED MAN TO BE FREE, TO CHART HIS OWN COURSE, AND TO EARN MIS OWN
ALVATION. LET US, AS REPUBLICANS, HAVE THE COURAGE TO LIFT THAT KIND
F BAHNER IN THIS ELECTION YEAR, ONE THAT ASKS FOR THE BEST OF ALL OF
IS, INSTEAD OF PROMISING WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE BEST FOR ONLY SOME OF US.
WE'RE WATCHED BY MILLIONS OF AMERICANS, A VOTING BLOCK CROSSING RACIAL,
SELIGIOUS, ETHNIC, AND YES, PARTY LINES. AND, THERE ARE: OTHERS WHO ARE
WATCHING, MILLIONS OF YOUNG AMERICANS, OUR SONS AID DAUGHTERS, WAITING
TO SEE IF ONCE AGAIN WE'LL LET OURSELVES BE DIVIDED BY LABELS, APPLIED
COMPLETE WITH HYPHEN, BEFORE WE USE THE WORD REPUBLICAN. THEY'RE
WATCHING TO SEE IF WE PLACE MORF IMPORTANCE ON THOSE SUADINGS AND ON
CLD PAST PARTY GRUDGES, THAN WE DO ON THE CHALLENGE THAT CONFRONTS US.
FOR WITH THEIR YOUTHFUL WISDOM, THEY KNOW THE PRICE THEY'LL PAY IF WE
FAIL TO MEET OUR CHALLENGE, BECAUSE THE STAKE WE PLAY FOR NOW, IS THE
FUTURE IN WHICH THEY MUST LIST.
AN OHIO DOCTOR, A SIMPLE MAN, WROTE: "FOR ONE SHINING GLORIOUS MOMENT
OF HISTORY, WE HAD THE KEY, THE OPEN DOOR, AND THE WAY WAS THERE BEFORE
US, MEN THREW OFF THE YOKE OF CENTURIES .AND THRUST FORWARD ALONG THAT
WAY WITH SUCH BRILLIANCE, THAT FOR A LITTLE WHILE, WE WERE THE LIGHT
AND THE INSPIRATION OF THE WORLD. NOW THE KEY HAS BEEN THROWN CARELESSLY
ASIDE; THE DOOR IS CLOSING, WE ARE LOSING THAT WAY." YOU AND I CAN HAVE
NO GREATER CHALLENGE, NO GREATER RESPONSIBILITY, NO GREATER GIFT TO
LEAVE TO OUR CHILDREN, THAN THE RESTORATION OF THAT AMERICAN DREAM.
(APPLAUSE)