Thank you. Thank
you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been
identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't
been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted
to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice
that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most
of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another
course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now,
one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this
election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been
used, "We've never had it so good."
But I have an
uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we
can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever
survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income.
Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax
collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million
dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our
budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three
times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a
half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the
world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don't own
an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've just
had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its
total value.
As for the peace
that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the
wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask
them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained
indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be
left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying
some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most
dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the
swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so
doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the
greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least
to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we
still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding
Fathers.
Not too long ago,
two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who
had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends
turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the
Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape
to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose
freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on
earth.
And this idea that
government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of
power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most
unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.
This is the issue
of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government
or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little
intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us
better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told
increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to
suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or
down -- [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual
freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of
totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian
motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on
this downward course.
In this
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 Fullbright has said at Stanford University that
the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as "our moral
teacher and our leader," and he says he is "hobbled in his task by the
restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document." He
must "be freed," so that he "can do for us" what he knows "is best." And
Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines
liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full
power of centralized government."
Well, I, for one,
resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the
free men and women of this country, as "the masses." This is a term we
haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full
power of centralized government" -- this was the very thing the Founding
Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control
things. A government can't control the economy without controlling
people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use
force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those
Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government
does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the
economy.
Now, we have no
better example of this than government's involvement in the farm economy
over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly
doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85% of the
farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has
known a 21% increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce.
You see, that one-fourth of farming -- that's regulated and controlled
by the federal government. In the last three years we've spent 43
dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we
don't grow.
Senator Humphrey
last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to
eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because
he'll find out that we've had a decline of 5 million in the farm
population under these government programs. He'll also find that the
Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension
of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free.
He'll find that they've also asked for the right to imprison farmers who
wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The
Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through
condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that
same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal
government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.
At the same time,
there's been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees.
There's now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they
can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared
without a trace and Billie Sol Estes
never left shore.
Every responsible
farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free
the farm economy, but how -- who are farmers to know what's best for
them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government
passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to
the farmer goes down.
Meanwhile, back in
the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private
property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything
a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes
from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in
Cleveland, Ohio, a 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 to start building public housing units in the
thousands, where heretofore we've only built them in the hundreds. But
FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us
they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage
foreclosure. For three decades, we've sought to solve the problems of
unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail,
the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency.
They've just
declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has
two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over 30 million
dollars on deposit in personal savings in their banks. And when the
government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed.
We have so many
people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming
to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the
thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery
through government and government planning. Well, now, if government
planning and welfare had the answer -- and they've had almost 30 years
of it -- shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in
a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the
number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public
housing?
But the reverse is
true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We
were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each
night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now
we're told that 9.3 million families in this country are
poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year.
Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the
Depression. We're spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a
little arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided the 45 billion
dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we'd be able to
give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present
income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is
only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that
someplace there must be some overhead.
Now -- so now we
declare "war on poverty," or "You, too, can be a Bobby Baker." Now do
they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to
the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-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 youth
feature. We're now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile
delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps [Civilian
Conservation Corps], and we're going to put our young people in these
camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we're going to
spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help
4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course,
don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile
delinquency.
But seriously,
what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge
called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who'd come
before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her
seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer
earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar
raise. She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent
Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood
who'd already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you
and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being
against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always "against" things
-- we're never "for" anything.
Well, the trouble
with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that
they know so much that isn't so.
Now -- we're for a
provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of
old age, and to that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward
meeting the problem.
But we're against
those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding
its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the
program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on
them for a livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred
million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme
Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the
term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security
dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government
has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial
head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social
Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he
said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the
power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they
needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that.
A young man, 21
years of age, working at an average salary -- his Social Security
contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that
would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises
127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that
would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business
sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people
who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're
due -- that the cupboard isn't bare?
Barry Goldwater
thinks we can.
At the same time,
can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who
can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence
that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not
allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits
supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be
allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program,
which we cannot do? I think we're for telling our senior citizens that
no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack
of funds. But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of
need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such
examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their
Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road.
In addition, was
Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government
give up its program of deliberate, planned inflation, so that when you
do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth,
and not 45 cents worth?
I think we're for
an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek
peace. But I think we're against subordinating American interests to an
organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can
muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among
nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I
think we're against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here
and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of
silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved
in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.
I think we're for
aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those
nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling
out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not
socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're
helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought
a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for
Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We
bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In
the last six years, 52 nations have bought 7 billion dollars worth of
our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.
No government ever
voluntarily reduces itself in size. So.governments' programs, once
launched, never disappear.
Actually, a
government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on
this earth.
Federal employees
-- federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state,
and local, one out of six of the nation's work force employed by
government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of
regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many
of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property
without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let
alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at
auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas,
James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a
17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at
auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to
make the system work.
Last February 19th
at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for
President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater
became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United
States." I think that's exactly what he will do.
But as a former
Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn
this parallel to socialism with the present administration, because back
in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before
the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was
taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road
under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from
his Party, and he never returned til the day he died -- because to this
day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that
honorable Party, down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party
of England.
Now it doesn't
require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to
impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the
deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the
government holds the power of life and death over that business or
property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find
some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every
businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has
taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a
dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so
close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
Our Democratic
opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you
and I believe that this is a contest between two men -- that we're to
choose just between two personalities.
Well what of this
man that they would destroy -- and in destroying, they would destroy
that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear? Is he the
brash and shallow and 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 believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or
dishonorable thing.
This is a man who,
in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a
profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in
health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent
of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension
plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an
employee who was ill and couldn't work. He provides nursing care for the
children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by
the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew
medicine and supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me
how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War,
and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to
Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen
there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over
the loudspeaker and said, "Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona,
go to runway such-and-such," and they went down there, and there was a
fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those
weeks before Christmas, all day long, he'd load up the plane, fly it to
Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.
During the hectic
split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to
sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers
were understandably impatient, but he said, "There aren't many left who
care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care." This is a man
who said to his 19-year-old son, "There is no foundation like the rock
of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that
rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a
real start." This is not a man who could carelessly send other people's
sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the
other problems I've discussed academic, unless we realize we're in a war
that must be won.
Those who would
trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us
they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their
policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only avoid any direct
confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to
love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we
offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a
simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the
courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy
based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.
We cannot buy our
security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an
immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved
behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save
our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters."
Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger
is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record
straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but
there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have
it in the next second -- surrender.
Admittedly,
there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson
of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this
is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face -- that
their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice
between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue
to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face
the final demand -- the ultimatum. And what then -- when Nikita
Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has
told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and
someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our
surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been
weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes
this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any
price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd
rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the
road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and
do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be
purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is
worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy?
Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery
under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the
patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to
fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not
fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of
the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well
it's a simple answer after all.
You and I have the
courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay."
"There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this -- this
is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through
strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured
by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the
world, we learn we're spirits -- not animals." And he said, "There's
something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which,
whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a
rendezvous with destiny.
We'll preserve for
our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence
them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
We will keep in
mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith
that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make
our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
Thank you very
much. |