It's A Saturday Morning Bonus Podcast For 01-04-25

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Barry Show. Arguably Ronald Reagan's most famous speech
he ever delivered arguably was delivered before he was ever president.
It was in nineteen sixty four. He was campaigning for
Barry Goldwater, who of course would lose to Lyndon Johnson
that year, and the speech was entitled a Time for Choosing.

(00:24):
Ronald Reagan was at that point mostly known as a
former actor. He would go on to be great governor
of State of California and presidential candidate and then of
course president, the leader of the Conservative movement, the man
who uttered de phrase make America Great Again in nineteen

(00:44):
eighty October twenty seventh, nineteen sixty four. This is a
defining moment in what would become an incredible political career.
He'd done so many other things before, and it really
highlights his ideological shift from a Hollywood actor and a

(01:06):
Democrat and confirmed Democrat, to not only a staunch conservative Republican,
but the man who would become the leader of the
conservative movement in America. He warns against government control which
was encroaching upon individual freedoms. This is a timeless speech

(01:27):
and he argues still true today. Expanding federal programs and
bureaucracies risked undermining personal individual liberties and the concept that
is core to our being and that is self reliance.
Don't feed the bears, They'll grow dependent on it and
won't be able to take care of themselves. This is

(01:48):
Ronald Reagan, a time for choosing enjoy.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
The following pre recorded political program is sponsored by TV
for Goldwater Miller on behalf of Very Goldwater, Republican candidate
for President of the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, we
take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Mister Reagan, thank you, thank you very much, thank you,
and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike
most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script.

(02:26):
As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to
choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding
the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat.
I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I
believe that the issues confronting as cross party lines. Now

(02:46):
one side in this campaign has been telling us that
the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace
and prosperity. The line has been used, We've never had
it so good. But I have an uncomfortable feeling that
this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our
hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever
survived a tax burden that reached a third of its
national income. Today, thirty seven cents out of every dollar

(03:09):
earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and
yet our government continues to spend seventeen million dollars a
day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced
our budget twenty eight out of the last thirty four years.
We've raised our debt limit three times in the last
twelve months, and now our national debt is one and
a half times bigger than all the combined debts of

(03:31):
all the nations of the world. We have fifteen billion
dollars in gold in our treasury. We don't own an
ounce four hundred dollars. Claims are twenty seven point three
billion dollars, and we've just had announced that the dollar
of nineteen thirty nine will now purchase forty five cents
in its total value. As for the peace that we

(03:52):
would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to
approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has
died in South beat Nam, and asked them if they
think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely,
Do they mean peace or do they mean we just
want to be left in peace? There can be no
real peace while one American is dying some place in

(04:13):
the world. For the rest of us, we're at war
with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind
in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.
And it's been said, if we lose that war, and
in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours,
history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who
had the most to lose did the least to prevent
its happening. Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves

(04:35):
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
business man who had escaped from Castro, And in the
midst of his story, one of my friends turned to
the other and said, we don't know how lucky we are,
And the Cuban stopped and said, how lucky you are.
I had some place to escape to, And in that

(04:57):
sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose
freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is
the last stand on earth. And this idea that government
is beholden to the people, that it has no other
source of power except the sovereign people, is still the
newest and the most unique idea in all the long
history of man's relation to man. This is the issue
of this election, whether we believe in our capacity for

(05:21):
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 is only an up or
down man's old age dream, the ultimate an individual freedom

(05:48):
consistent with law and order, or down to the ant
heap of fatalitarianism. 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
used terms like the great society, or as we were
told a few days ago by the President, we must

(06:09):
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.

(06:30):
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 twentieth century. Senator Fulbright
has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded.
He referred to the President as our moral teacher and

(06:52):
our leader, and he says he is hobbled in his
task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by
this antiquated docus. 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

(07:14):
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.

(07:35):
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

(07:57):
sector of the economy. Now we have no better example
of this than government's involvement of the farm economy over
the last thirty years. Since nineteen fifty five, the cost
of this program is nearly doubled. One fourth of farming
in America is responsible for eighty five percent of the
farm surplus. Three fourths of farming is out on the
free market and has known a twenty one percent increase

(08:19):
in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You
see that one fourth of farming that's regulated and controlled
by the federal government. In the last three years, we've
spent forty three dollars in the feed grain program for
every dollar bushel of corn we don't grow. Senator Humphrey
last week charged that Burry Goldwater as president, would seek
to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better,

(08:42):
because he'll find out that we've had a decline of
five million in the farm population under these government programs.
He'll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to
get from Congress extension of the farm program to include
that three forth that is now free. He'll find that
they've also asked for the right to improve is in
farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government.

(09:03):
The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize
farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And
contained in that same program was a provision that would
have allowed the federal government to remove two million farmers
from the soil. At the same time, there's been an
increase in the Department of agriculture employees. There's now one

(09:24):
for every thirty farms in the United States. And still
they can't tell us how sixty six shiploads of grain
headed for Austria disappeared without a trace, and Billy Solastus
never left shore. Every responsible farmer and farm organization has

(09:48):
repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy. But
how who are farmers to know what's best for them?
The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government
passed it anyway. Now the price of bread good up.
The price a week to the farmer goes down. Meanwhile,
back in the city, under urban renewal, the assault on
freedom carries on private property rights so deluded that public

(10:11):
interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it
should be in a program that takes from the needy
and gives to the greedy. We see such spectacles as
in Cleveland, Ohio, a million and a half dollar building
completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make
way for what government officials call a more compatible use
of the land. The President tells us he's now going

(10:32):
to start building public housing units in the thousands, where
heretofore we've only built them in the hundreds, but FHA
and the Veterans Administration tell us they have one hundred
and twenty thousand housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosure.
For three decades, we've sought to solve the problems of
unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail,
the more the planner's plan. The latest is the Area

(10:54):
Redevelopment Agency. They've just declared Rice County, Kansas a depressed area.
Rice County, Kansas has two hundred oil wells and the
fourteen thousand people there have over thirty million dollars on
deposit in personal savings in their banks. When the government

(11:17):
tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed. We
have so many people who can't see a fat man
standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion
the fat man got that way by taking advantage of
the fin one. So they're going to solve all the
problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now,
if government planning and welfare had the answer, and they've

(11:40):
had almost thirty years of it, shouldn't we expect government
to read the score to us Once in a while,
shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year
in the number of people needing help, the reduction in
the need for public housing. But the reverse is true.
Each year the need grows greater, the program grows greater.
We were told for years ago that seventeen million people

(12:02):
went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true,
they were all on a diet. But now we're told
that nine point three million families in this country are
poverty stricken on the basis of earning less than three
thousand dollars a year. Welfare spending ten times greater than
it was in the dark depths of the depression. We're
spending forty five billion dollars on welfare. Now, do a

(12:24):
little arithmetic and you'll find that if we divided the
forty five billion dollars up equally among those nine million
poor families, we'd be able to give each family forty
six hundred dollars a year, and this, added to their
present income, should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however,

(12:48):
is only running about six hundred dollars per family. It
would seem that someplace there must be some overhead. Now,
so now we decay war on poverty, or you too
can be a Bobby Baker. Now do they honestly expect
us to believe that if we add one billion dollars

(13:09):
to the forty five billion, we're spending one more program
to the thirty odd we have. And remember, this new
program doesn't replace any it just duplicates existing programs. Do
they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well,
in all fairness, I should explain, there is one part
of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the

(13:30):
youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout problem,
juvenile delinquency by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps,
and we're going to put our young people in these camps.
But again, we do some arithmetic and we find that
we're going to spend each year just on room and
board for each young person we help forty seven hundred

(13:50):
dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for
twenty seven hundred. Course, don't get me wrong, I'm not
suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency, But seriously,

(14:15):
what are we doing to those we seek to help?
Not too long ago, a judge called me here in
Los Angeles. He told me that a young woman who'd
come before him for a divorce she had six children,
was pregnant with her seven. Under his questioning, she revealed
her husband was a laborer earning two hundred and fifty
dollars a month. She wanted the divorce to get an
eighty dollar raise. She's eligible for three hundred and thirty

(14:37):
dollars a month and the Aid to Dependent Children program.
She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood
who'd already done that very thing. Yet, any time you
and I question the schemes of the do gooders were
denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say, we're
always against things, we're never for anything. Well, the trouble
with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant. It's

(14:57):
just that they know so much that isn't so. Now,
we're for a provision the destitution should not follow unemployment
by reason of old age, and to that end, we've
accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we're against those entrusted with this program when they

(15:21):
practiced deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that
any criticism of the program means that we want to
end payments to those people who depend on them for
a livelihood. They've called it insurance to us in a
hundred million pieces of literature, But then they appeared before
the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program.
They only used the term insurance to sell it to

(15:43):
the people, and they said social security dues are a
tax for the general use of the government, and the
government has used that tax. There is no fund because
Robert Buyers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee
and admitted that social Security as of this more is
two hundred and ninety eight billion dollars in the hole.

(16:04):
But he said there should be no cause for worry
because as long as they had the powered to tax,
they could always take away from the people whatever they
needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing
just that. A young man twenty one years of age,
working at an average salary, his social Security contribution would
in the open market buy him an insurance policy that

(16:25):
would guarantee two hundred and twenty dollars a month. At
age sixty five, The government promises one hundred and twenty seven,
he could live it up until he's thirty one and
then take out a policy that would pay more than
Social Security. Now, are we so lacking in business sense
that we can't put this program on a sound basis
so that people who do require those payments will find

(16:46):
they can get them when they're due. That the cupboard
isn't bare Bury Goldwater thinks we can. At the same time,
can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen
who can do better on his own to be excused
upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for
the non earning years. Should we not allow a widow

(17:07):
with children to work and not lose the benefits supposedly
paid for by her deceased husband. Shouldn't you and I
be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under
this program, which we cannot do. I think we're fore
telling our senior citizens that no one in this country
should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds.
But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need,

(17:29):
into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such
examples as was announced last week when France admitted that
their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the
end of the road. In addition, was Barry Goldwater so
irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its
program of deliberate planned inflation so that when you do
get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a

(17:53):
dollar's worth and not forty five cents worth. I think
we're for an international organization where the nations of the
world can seek peace. But I think we're against subordinating
American interest to an organization that has become so structurally
unsound that today you can muster a two thirds vote
on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that

(18:14):
represent less than ten percent of the world's population. I
think we're against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because
here and there they cling to a colony, while we
engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our
mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet
colonies in the satellite nations. I think we're foriding our

(18:44):
allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations
which share in our fundamental beliefs. But we're against doling
out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism,
all over the world. We set out to help nineteen countries.
We're helping one hundred, and we've spent one hundred and
forty six billion dollars with that money. We've bought a

(19:04):
two million dollar yacht for highly Selassie. We bought dress
suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya government officials.
We bought one thousand TV sets for a place where
they have no electricity. In the last six years, fifty
two nations have bought seven billion dollars worth of our gold,
and all fifty two are receiving foreign aid from this country.

(19:27):
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size, so government programs,
once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the
nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.
Federal employees Federal employees number two and a half million,

(19:49):
and federal, state, and local one out of six of
the nation's workforce employed by government. These proliferating bureaus, with
their thousands of regulations, have cost us many of our
constitutional sins safeguards. How many of us realize that today
federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant,
They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let
alone a trial by jury, and they can seize and

(20:11):
sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of
that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Weir overplanted his
rice allotment. The government obtained a seventeen thousand dollars judgment,
and a US marshal sold his nine hundred and sixty
acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary
as a warning to others to make the system work.

(20:38):
Last February nineteenth, at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas,
six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket,
said if Burry Goldwater became president, he would stop the
advance of socialism in the United States. I think that's
exactly what he will do. But as a former Democrat,

(21:08):
I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man
who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration,
because back in nineteen thirty six, mister Democrat himself, Al Smith,
a great American, came before the American people and charged
that the leadership of his party was taking the party
of Jefferson Jackson and Cleveland down the road under the
banners of Marx, Lennon and Stalin. And he walked away

(21:30):
from his party, and he never returned till the day
he died. Because to this day the leadership of that
party has been taking that party, that honorable party, down
the road in the image of the Labor Socialist Party
of England. Now, it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of
private property or business to impose socialism on a people.
What does it mean whether you hold the deed to

(21:53):
the or the title to your business or property. If
the government holds the power of life and death over
that business or property, and such machinery already exists, the
government can find some charge to bring against any concern
he chooses to prosecute. Every business man has his own
tale of harassment. Somewhere, a perversion has taken place. Our natural,

(22:14):
unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government,
and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to
slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
Our democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They
want to make you and I believe that this is
a contest between two men that were to choose just
between two personalities. Well, what of this man that they

(22:36):
would destroy? And in destroying they would destroy that which
he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear?
Is he the brash and shallow and trigger happy man
they say he is. Well, I've been privileged to know
him when I knew him long before he ever dreamed
of trying for high office. And I can tell you personally,
I've never known a man in my life I believe

(22:58):
so incapable of doing a dishonest for dishonorable. This is
a man who, in his own business, before he entered politics,
instituted a profit sharing plan before unions had ever thought

(23:19):
of it. He put in health and medical insurance for
all his employees. He took fifty percent of the profits
before taxes, and set up a retirement program, a pension
plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for
life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work.
He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who
work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the

(23:41):
floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane
and flew medicine and supplies down there. An XGI told
me how he met him. It was the week before
Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the
Los Angeles Airport trying to get a ride home to
Arizona for Christmas. And he said that a lot of
servicemen and no seats available in the plains. And then

(24:02):
a voice came over the loud speaker and said, any
men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to
runway such and such, and they went down there. There
was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane
every day in those weeks before Christmas. All day long,
he'd load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly
them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.
During the hectic, split second timing of a campaign, this

(24:26):
is a man who took time out to sit beside
an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign
managers were understandably impatient, but he said, there aren't many
left to care what happens to her. I'd like her
to know I care. This is a man who said
to his nineteen year old son, there is no foundation
like the rock of honesty and fairness. And when you

(24:47):
begin to build your life on that rock, with the
cement of the faith in God that you have, then
you have a real start. This is not a man
who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. That
is the issue of this campaign that makes all the
other problems I've discussed academic unless we realize we're in

(25:07):
a war that must be won. Those who would trade
our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state
have told us they have a utopian solution of peace
without victory. They call their policy accommodation, and they say,
if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy,
he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us.
All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say,

(25:29):
we offer simple answers to complex problems. But perhaps there
is a simple answer, not an easy answer, but simple.
If you and I have the courage to tell our
elected officials that we want our national policy based on
what we know in our hearts is morally right, we
cannot but by our security, our freedom from the threat
of the bomb, by committing an immorality so great as

(25:53):
saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the
iron curtain. Give up your dreams of freedom, because to
save our own skins, we are willing to make a
deal with your slave masters. Alexander Hamilton said, a nation
which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a
master and deserves one. Now let's set the record straight.
There's no argument over the choice between peace and war.

(26:16):
But there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace,
and you can have it in the next second surrender. Admittedly,
there's a risk in any course we follow other than this,
but every lesson of history tells us that the greater
risk lies in appeasement. And this is the specter our
well meaning liberal friends refuse to face that their policy
of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between

(26:39):
peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we
continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we
have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what
then when the Kita Kruzchef has told his people he
knows what our answer will be. He has told them
that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War,

(27:00):
and some day when the time comes to deliver the
final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that
time we will have been weakened from within, spiritually, morally,
and economically. He believes this because from our side he's
heard voices pleading for peace at any price, or better
red than dead, or, as one commentator put it, he'd
rather live on his knees than die on his feet.

(27:22):
And therein lies the road to war, because those voices
don't speak for the rest of us. You and I
know and do not believe that life is so dear
and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the
price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is
worth dying for? When did this begin just in the
face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the

(27:43):
children of Israel to live in slavery under the Pharaohs?
Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at
Conquered Bridge have thrown down their guns and refuse to
fire the shot heard round the world? The martyrs of
history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave
their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't
die in vain. Where then, is the road to peace. Well,

(28:06):
it's a simple answer. After all, you and I have
the courage to say to our enemies there is a
price we will not pay. There is a point beyond
which they must not advance. And this this is the

(28:32):
meaning in the phrase of Bury gold Water piece through strength.
Winston Churchill said the destiny of man is not measured
by material computations. When great forces around the move in
the world, we learn we're spirits, not animals. And he
said there's something going on in time and space and
beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not,

(28:52):
spells duty. You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We'll preserve for our children this the last best hope
of men on earth, or we'll sentence them to take
the last step into a thousand years of darkness. We
will heap in mind and remember that very Goldwater has
faith in us. He has faith that you and I
have the ability and the dignity and the right to

(29:15):
make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.

Speaker 4 (29:19):
Thank you very much, Thank you, Ronnie for the s

(29:53):
very stirring speech. I am John Kilroy, National Chairman TV
for Goldwater MI.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
I want to ask each of you I want to
ask each.

Speaker 4 (30:08):
Of you to take part in this important presidential campaign
by contributing what you can to keep the Goldwater Crusade
on the air. Send one ten fifty dollars or any
amount to TV for Goldwater Miller Box eighty, Los Angeles

(30:29):
fifty one. I repeat TV Goldwater Miller Box eighty, Los
Angeles fifty one.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Preceding pre recorded political program was paid for by TV
for Goldwater Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate
for President of the United States.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
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(31:11):
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(31:35):
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(31:58):
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(32:23):
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