REAGAN ON SOCIALISM 50 YEARS AGO- Whats Past IS Prologe

Video Transcript:

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. Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed? To the title of your business or property, if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property and such machinery already exists, the government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government. And freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the founding fathers. Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who would escape from Castro. And in the midst of his story, one of my friends turned to the other and said, we don't know how lucky we are. And the Cuban stopped and said, how lucky you are. I had some place to escape to. And in that sentence, he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people. It's still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite, in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well, I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down. Man's old, old age dream, the ultimate, an individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the antepe of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote harvesting time, they use terms like the Great Society. Or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they've been a little more explicit in the past. And among themselves, and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print, these are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say the cold war will end through our acceptance of a not-undemocratic socialism. Another voice says the profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state. Or our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century. Senator Fulbright has said a Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the president as our moral teacher and our leader. And he says he is hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document. He must be freed so that he can do for us what he knows is best. And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government. Well, I for one resented when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country as the masses. This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, the full power of centralized government, this was the very thing the founding fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew those founding fathers that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.