A Time For Choosing

I read this speech today by Ronald Reagan. He gave it in support of the Goldwater campaign back in 1964. It's not that long, but as is anything I post on this blog, definitely worth reading. And I'll leave you with some excerpts (the emphases are my own):

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves...

The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.

Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.

Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything...

We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....

Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.

Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.

If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.

Isn't it interesting? That speech was given more than 40 years ago, but are any of the issues really different then than they are now?

When I read this stuff, sometimes I'm inclined to think, well doesn't it always seem like it is always the most important election ever? Is there ever a time when these decisions and elections aren't the balancing point between falling from absolute good into absolute evil? I've largely ignored issues all my life, and I can't say that I feel like my life would be appreciably different if I did do a little more reading, vote in more elections, or just struck up more political conversations, so why should I bother to change that now?

Those excuses for indifference just don't work for me. The minor compromises we make now in not being informed and caring about what's going on in the world around us now lead us to the major concessions we make later in our ethics and values because we failed to uphold them before it was too late. The grounds for the same-sex marriage initiatives weren't laid in the last couple months, but years ago. There are lots of other examples, but I'm sure nobody read this far. It's important, and if we choose not to care about it now, then we're going to pay for it later.

The more I read Reagan's words and the more I read about him, the more I understand why there is so much reverence for him on the conservative side, on both sides, really.