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Oh, thank you.
You've done that once. Thank you very much. Thank you.
President Roche --
and I hope that the people of Michigan are as intelligent as I believe
they are -- one day, Senator Roche. I told some of the Press this
afternoon I was torn with mixed emotions on that. I know what we means
in the battle, the very important battle of preserving independent
education in the United States. But I think, perhaps, he could continue
doing that on a wider stage and fight for some other causes as well --
you, ladies and gentlemen, students of Hillsdale, the friends of the
College, I'm delighted to be here, first time, although I've been
well-acquainted for a long time with what Hillsdale means. And John,
you've paved the way a little bit here -- your most gracious remarks. I
didn't deserve all of them. But they eased my feeling about being here,
speaking under these exact circumstances.
You know, every
speaker hopes that his remarks will be well-chosen, well-suited to the
occasion. And every speaker has had the experience of not having that
true. We had a fellow in Hollywood once, for many years, he's an actor.
He was working because his first love, really, was opera. And when he
has saved enough money to study opera, he journeyed to Milan, Italy,
studied opera, and after a period there was invited to sing at
La Scala,
the very spiritual fountainhead of opera. And they were doing
Pagliacci and he sang the beautiful
aria, "Veste la Juba." And when he'd finished the applause from the
balcony of the orchestra seats, the galleries, were so sustained, so
thunderous that the opera couldn't continue until he stepped back and
repeated the aria as an encore. And again, same sustained, thunderous
applause. And again, he sang Veste la Juba. And this went on until
finally he motioned for quiet and he tried to tell them on this, his
first appearance, what a dream come true this was -- to be greeted in
this warm way. But he said, "I have sung Veste la Juba, now, nine times.
My voice is gone. I cannot do it again." And a voice from the balcony
said, "You'll do it till you get it right."
You know, I say
I'm delighted to be here and yet I have an uncomfortable feeling that
I'm saving souls in heaven. You don't need the convincing that I usually
try to do when I -- when I'm speaking on this subject. But maybe I can
talk to you about the need for communication. One of the most recent
things that I heard, of course, was that now, like so many other
schools, you have a Young American[s] For Freedom chapter
on the campus, and I'm delighted to hear that because I've been a
beneficiary of their support and help on a number of occasion, and I
wish your new chapter well.
But this thing of
communication is more important than a willing speaker and a willing
listener. It requires imparting some information but also it's based on
the manner in which it's done. And I had the real meaning of
communication explained to me once by a fellow named Danny Villanueva,
who used to place-kick for the Los Angeles Rams and later the Dallas
Cowboys, and then he became a sports announcer in Los Angeles.
And he told me he
was having dinner one night over at the home of young ballplayer with
the Dodgers. (You remember the Dodgers.) And they were talking sports.
The young wife was bustling about getting the dinner ready, and the baby
started to cry. And over her shoulder she said to her husband, "Change
the baby." And he was a young fellow; he was embarrassed, and he looked
at Danny and back at her and he said, "What do you mean change the
baby?" I'm a ballplayer; that's not my line of work. And she turned
around, put her hands on her hips, and she communicated. She said, "Look
buster, you lay the baby down like a diamond. You put second base on
home plate, put the baby's bottom on pitchers mound, hook up first and
third, slide home underneath, and if it starts to rain the game ain't
called -- you start all over again."
But, if can't save
your souls, at least perhaps I might impart some information here
that'll be helpful to you in the communication that has to take place.
In the campaign last year, there was a great deal of talk about the
seeming inability of an economic system that has provided more for more
people than anything we've ever known to solve the problems of
unemployment and inflation. Issues such as taxes and government power
and cost were discussed. But always these things were discussed in the
context of "What did government intend to do about them." Well may I
suggest for your consideration that government has already done too much
about them -- that, indeed, by government going outside its proper
province has caused many, if not most, the problems that vex us.
There are a few of
us old enough to remember that the only experience you ever had with the
federal government was to go downtown to the post office and buy a
stamp. They were 2 cents each for twice-a-day delivery. Now they're 13
cents for once-a-day delivery -- to the wrong address. My friend Dewey
Bartlett, the Senator from Oklahoma, says that last 3 cents on the price
is for storage. And he's - he has is -- he's suggested that we can
improve the service is we just started paying the postal employees by
mail.
But how much are
we to blame for what has happened? Beginning with the traumatic
experience of the Great Depression, we the people have turned more and
more to government for answers that government has neither the right nor
the capacity to provide. But government, as an institution, always tends
to increase in size and power, not just this government -- any
government. It's built-in. And so government attempted to provide the
answers.
The result is a
fourth branch added to the traditional three of executive, legislative,
and judicial: a vast federal bureaucracy that's now being imitated in
too many states and too many cities, a bureaucracy of enormous power
which determines policy to a greater extent than any of us realize, very
possibly to a greater extent than our own elected representatives. And
it can't be removed from office by our votes.
To give you an
illustration using another country, England, in 1803 created a new civil
service position. It called for a man to stand on the cliffs of Dover
with a spy glass and ring a bell if he saw Napoleon coming. They didn't
eliminate that job until 1945. In our own country, there are only two
government programs that we have totally wiped out and abolished: the
government stopped making rum on the Virgin Islands, and we've stopped
breeding horses for the cavalry.
We bear a greater
tax burden to support that permanent structure than any of us would have
believed possible just a few decades ago. When I was where you are, in
college, governments federal, state and local, were taking a dime out of
every dollar earned and less than a third of that paid for the federal
establishment. Today, governments, federal, state, and local, are taking
44 cents out of every dollar earned, and two-thirds of that supports
Washington. It is the fastest growing item in the average family budget,
and yet it is not one of the factors used in computing the cost of
living index. It is the biggest single cost item in the family budget;
it is bigger than food, shelter, and clothing all put together.
When government
tells us, as it did a few weeks ago, that in the last year the people of
America have increased their earnings 9 percent, and since the inflation
was 6 percent, well we're still 3 percentage points better off --
richer than we were the year before -- government is being deceitful.
That was before taxes. After taxes, the people of America are 3
percentage points worse off, poorer than they were before they got the 9
percent raise. Government profits by inflation.
At the economic
conference in London several months ago, one of our American
representatives there was talking to the press. And he said, "You have
to recognize that inflation doesn't have any single cause. It's caused
by a number of things, and therefore there is no single answer." Well,
if he believed that, he had no business being at an economic conference.
Inflation is caused by one thing, and it has one answer. It's caused by
government spending more than government takes in, and it will go away
when government stops doing that, and not before.
I could give a
figure that I think would explain it because government has been trying
to make all of us believe that somehow inflation is like a plague, or
the drought, or the locusts coming, that no one has any control over it
and we just have to bear it when it comes along and hope it will go
away. No, it's simpler than that. From 1933 until the now, our country
has doubled the amount of goods and purchases that are available for
purchase -- goods and services. In that same period we have multiplied
the money supply by 23 times. So eleven and a half dollars are now
chasing what one dollar used to chase. And that's all that inflation is:
a depreciation of the value of money.
I know that his is
called the Ludwig von Mises series. But do you know that before I knew
that I had a line that I intended to give you. It's a quote of his if
you haven't heard it. Ludwig von Mises said that, "Government is the
only agency that can take a perfectly useful commodity like paper, smear
it with some ink, and render it absolutely useless."
Sometimes I think
that government fits that old-fashioned definition of a baby: An
alimentary canal with an appetite at one end and no sense of
responsibility at the other.
There are 73
million of us working and earning in the private sector. We support
ourselves and our dependents. We support, in addition, 81 million other
Americans totally dependent on tax dollars for their year-round living.
Now it's true that 15 million of those are public employees and they
also pay taxes, but their taxes are simply a return to government of
dollars that first had to be taken from the 73 million. I say this to
emphasize that the people working and earning in the private sector are
the only resource that government has.
Political
demagogues aided by spokesmen for a variety of causes, some worthy in
themselves but questionable as to whether they're a proper concern of
government, have created a political and economic mythology widely
believed by too many people. This is why we need the communications.
This, more than anything else, has increased government’s ability to
interfere, as it does, in the marketplace. “Profit” is a dirty word,
blamed for most of our social ills. In the interest of something called
“consumerism," free enterprise is becoming far less free. Property
rights are being reduced and even eliminated in the name of
environmental protection. It is time that a voice be raised on behalf of
the 73 million, pointing out that profit, property rights, and freedom
are inseparable and you cannot have the third unless you continue to be
entitled to have the first two.
And yet -- And yet
even among us who perhaps believe that way, we have fallen into the
habit of when something goes wrong -- that saying, "They're ought to be
a law." Sometimes I think there ought to be a law against saying “there
ought to be a law.” A German statesman, Bismarck, said, “If you like
sausages and laws, you should never watch either one of them being
made.”
It’s difficult
to understand the ever-increasing number of intellectuals and the goals
of academia, present company excepted, who contend that our system could
be improved by the adoption of some of the -- of the features of
socialism. It isn’t that these eminent scholars are ignorant; it’s just
that they know a number of things that aren’t true. In any comparison
between the free market system and socialism, nowhere is the miracle of
capitalism more evident than in the production and distribution of food.
We eat better for a lower percentage of earnings than any other people
on earth. It averages about 17% of the average family income after
taxes. The American farmer is producing two and half times as much as he
did sixty years ago, with 1/3 the man-hours on 1/2 the land. And if his
counterparts worldwide could reach his level of skill, we could feed the
entire world population on 1/10 of the land that is now being farmed
worldwide.
The biggest
example I think, of course, comes when you compare the two superpowers.
I'm sure that most of you are aware that some years ago the Soviet Union
had such a morale problem with the workers on their collective farms
that they finally gave each one of those workers a little plot of ground
and told him he could farm it for himself. And, if he wanted to, he
could sell on the open market what he raised. Today, less than 4% of
Russia’s agricultural land is privately farmed in that way. And on that
4% is raised 40% of all of Russia’s vegetables and 60% of all the meat.
Some of our
scholars did some research on comparative food prices. They had to take
the prices in the Russian stores and our own stores and translate them
into minutes and hours of labor at the average income of each country.
And, with one exception they found that Russians have to work two to ten
times as long to buy the various food items than do their counterparts
here in America. The one exception was potatoes. There the price on
their potato bins worked out to less work time for them than it did for
us. There was one hitch though -- they didn't have any potatoes.
And yet, in spite
of all the evidence that points to the free market as the most efficient
system, we continue down a road that is bearing out the prophecy of the
Frenchman who came here 130 years ago -- de Tocqueville. He was
attracted by the miracle that was America. Think of it, our country was
only 70 years old and already we had achieved such a miracle of standard
of living and of productivity and prosperity that the rest of the world
was amazed. So he came here and he looked at everything he could see in
our country, trying to find the secret of our success and then went back
and wrote a book about it. But even then, 130 years ago, he saw signs
that prompted him to warn us, that if we weren’t constantly on guard we
would find ourselves covered by a network of regulations controlling
every activity. And he said, if that came to pass we would one day find
ourselves a nation of timid animals, with government the shepherd.
Well we are
covered by tens and tens of thousands of regulations to which we add
about 25,000 new ones each year. One of the newer agencies, the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has touched virtually
everyone’s life (OSHA). There’s a fellow in Indiana with a shop. He’s
got seven employees. At the front and back of his tiny shop there was a
twelve foot door -- each end. OSHA has just told him he has to install
exit signs in the event that a new employee might become confused in
case of fire and not be able to find his way out. He asked a pretty
logical question. He said if he can’t see a twelve foot door, how’s he
going to see that exit sign?
Now, I’m sure
that everyone in this room, at some time of other, has had an occasion
to climb a ladder. Simple wooden ladder. You put it up and climb it. How
in the world did we ever accomplish that without OSHA’s 144 rules and
regulations with regard to climbing a ladder, they’ve now written? The
first of which is that to climb a ladder you begin by facing it. And
then, of course -- I don’t know whether you know about their discovery
of the hazards of farm life -- they wrote quite a manual on that to save
the farmer from accident. One of them said that in walking about the
farm one should keep his eyes on the ground because here and there,
there might be a slippery substance which, if you step in it, could
cause a nasty fall. You know no farmer would have thought of that by
himself.
Well now,
they’ve discovered deep sea divers. There are 600 of them in the whole
United States. It’s a hazardous profession and their pay reflects it.
They get from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year. But it isn’t
going to be as dangerous if OSHA has its way. They’ve got a whole
manual, now, rules, regulations and required equipment. They haven't
implemented that program as yet because the United States Navy also has
divers. And it has informed OSHA that if they implement their [OSHA's]
program henceforth each diver will go beneath the waves weighing 1000
pounds. The General Accounting Office, which is responsible for public
employee safety has just recently inspected the building in Washington
where OSHA is headquartered. The have found it in violation of 300 of
OSHA's safety rules.
But all of this
becomes deadly serious when you think about the expense. A study of 700
of the largest corporations has found that if we could eliminate
unnecessary regulation of business and industry, we would instantly
reduce the inflation rate by half. Other economists have found that
over-regulation of business and industry amounts to a hidden five-cent
sales tax for every consumer. The misdirection of capital investment
costs us a quarter of a million jobs. That's half as many as the
President wants to create by spending 32 billion dollars over the next
two years. And with all of this comes the burden of government-required
paperwork.
It affects
education. All of you here are aware of the problems of financing
education, particularly at -- at the private educational institutions. I
had the president of a university tell me the other day that
government-required paperwork on his campus alone has raised the
administrative costs from 65,000 dollars to 600,000 dollars. That would
underwrite a pretty good [faculty] chair. Now, the president of the Eli
Lilly drug company says their drug company spends more on time --
man-hours on government-required paperwork than they do today on heart
and cancer research combined. He told of submitting one ton of paper,
120,000 pages of scientific data most of which he said were absolutely
worthless for FDA's purposes, in triplicate, in order to get a license
to market an arthritis medicine. So, the United States is no longer
first in the development of new health-giving drugs and medicines. We're
producing 60 percent fewer than we were 15 years ago.
As late as 1962
the average cost of developing and testing a new medicine was about
1,000,000 dollars, and it took about 2 to 4 years. Now, it is 40,000,000
dollars and it takes anywhere from 7 1/2 to 20 years. The change came
with the adoption of some amendments to the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics
Act of 1962. We could do something about it. There's a young rancher
who's now a Congressmen, Steve Sims. There, in Washington, he has,
before Congress with 113 cosigners, a bill to simply repeal those
amendments and not replace them with anything. It wouldn't affect our
safety one bit. All it takes to get them repealed is if enough people
could be aware that that bill is there and write letters to their
Congressmen and their Representatives and make them know that we want
such a bill passed. Why not? It adds 50 cents to the cost of this
paperwork that I'm talking about -- adds 50 cents to the cost of every
prescription written in the United States.
Now, maybe some
say, "Well it's not our problem. Leave it to the drug industry." Well,
then, how about the independent businessmen and women of this country
who spend 50 billion dollars a year sending 10 billion pieces of paper
to Washington where it costs 20 billion dollars each year of tax money
to shuffle and store that paper away. I've already mentioned the
overhead for complying of colleges and universities.
But we're so
used to talking billions. Does anyone realize how much a single billion
is? A billion minutes ago Christ was walking on this earth. A billion
hours ago our ancestors lived in caves, and it's questionable as to
whether they'd discovered the use of fire. A billion dollars ago was 19
hours in Washington, D.C. And it'll be another billion in the next 19
hours, and every 19 hours until they adopt a new budget at which time
it'll be almost a billion and a half. But let me really paint the
picture for you. If you gentlemen sent your wives out on a shopping
spree, and gave them each a billion dollars, and told them not to spend
more than a thousand dollars a day, they won't be home for 3000 years.
But, you know,
if you lose your economic, you lose your political freedom, all freedom.
Freedom is something that cannot be passed on in the blood stream, or
genetically. And it's never more than one generation away from
extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it,
or it's gone and gone for a long, long time. Already, many of us,
particularly those in business and industry, there are too many who have
switched rather than fight. And it's time that particularly, some of our
corporations learned, that when you get in bed with government, you're
going to get more than a good night's sleep.
We should take
inventory and see how many things we can do ourselves that we've come to
believe that only government can do. Let me take one that I'm sure
everyone thinks is a government monopoly -- and properly so. But do you
know that in Scottsdale, Arizona there is no city fire department? That
the per capita cost for fire loss is one-third of that of other cities
of similar size. And the per capita cost for fire protection is
one-third. And the insurance rates reflect this. Scottsdale contracts
out with a private, profit-making, fire-fighting company, which now has
about a dozen clients out in the western states, cities doing the same
thing.
Denton,
Arkansas, had a hot lunch program and they were having trouble with it
in their school. The kids wouldn't eat there because the food, they
said, was too poor in quality. The school board was losing about a 1000
dollars a month. Finally, in disgust, they went out and talked to
McDonalds. McDonalds came in and set up shop in the school cafeteria.
McDonalds is making a profit; ten times as many kids are eating there
every noon, and the school board's saving the tax payers a 1000 dollars
a month.
Two-thirds of
the cities and towns in American contract out with private companies for
garbage disposal. Those two-thirds of the cities and towns in this
country get their garbage picked up for 68% less than the cities and
towns that have their own municipal departments.
Have the great
corporations -- Sometimes I worry -- have they abdicated their
responsibility to preserve the freedom of the marketplace out of a fear
of retaliation or a reluctance to rock the boat. If they have, they're
feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat them last. We can fight city
hall, and you don't have to be a giant to do it. In New Mexico there's a
little company -- a husband and wife own it. She's the president. And
they have five employees. And the other day two OSHA inspectors arrived
at the door. And they demanded to come in, to go on a hunting expedition
[to] see if there were any violations of their safety rules, and if
there were there were automatic fines. There's no appeal. And she said,
"Where's your warrant?" And they said, "We don't need one." She said,
"You do to come in here," and shut the door. Well, they went out and got
a warrant, and they came back, but this time she had her lawyer with
her. He looked at it and he said it does not show probable cause. And a
federal court upheld her right to do this.
Up in Pocatello,
Idaho, was a man, elderly man, with grown sons. They owned a
sub-contracting plumbing and electrical firm -- 35 employees. He had
known that someday they would get to his door, and he'd wondered what he
would do. And he knew about -- he'd heard about the woman in New Mexico.
Sure enough, they came to his door, and he said, "not without a
warrant." And they read him
paragraph 8(a)
of the
OSHA Act. And he pointed to a framed
copy of the constitution on the wall of his office and said, "I think
there's a higher law ." Well they came back not with a warrant, but with
a court order. He defied it. He was cited for contempt. He got a lawyer.
Now his friends, and even the lawyer tried to talk him out of it. They
said, "You can't fight the government. That's too big for you. And just
love what he said to his friends. He said, "You know, we send our young
fellas out to fight and die for freedom. Maybe it's time some of us old
duffers did something for a change. Today, his case is before the United
States Supreme Court because a federal court has ruled that OSHA is in
violation of our constitutional protection against illegal search and
seizure.
But why don't more
of us challenge what Cicero called the arrogance of officialdom? Why
don't we set up communications between organizations [and trade
associations to rally others to come to the aid of an individual like
that, or to an industry or profession when they're threatened by the
barons of bureaucracy, who have forgotten that we are their employers.
Government by the people works when the people work at it. We can begin
by turning the spotlight of truth on the widespread political and
economic mythology that I mentioned.
A recent poll of
college and university students -- they must have skipped this campus --
because in this poll they found that the students estimated that
business profits in America average 45 percent. That's nine times the
average of business profits in this country. But it was understandable
that the kids made that mistake, because the professors in the same poll
guessed that the profits were even higher.
Then there's the
fairy tale born of political demagoguery that the tax structure imposes
unfairly on the low earner with loopholes designed for the more
affluent. Well, again the truth. At 23,000 dollars of earnings you
become one of that exclusive band of 10 percent of the earners in
America; and that 10 percent pays 50 percent of the income tax but only
takes 5 percent of all the deductions -- the so-called "loopholes" that
are allowed by law. The other 95 percent are taken by the 90 percent of
earners below $23,000 who pay the other half of the tax.
The most dangerous
myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share,
thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either
deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one
should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than
business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people
pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin
with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a
mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be --
through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the
retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the
product, no one along that line can stay in business.
But if you want to
explain it simply, a loaf of bread: If the farmer can't get enough for
his wheat to pay the tax on his farm -- the real estate tax -- he can't
go on raising wheat. And so when you buy that loaf of bread tomorrow,
just take a look: a hundred and fifty one taxes are in that loaf of
bread amounting to more than half of the price of bread.
The federal
government has used its taxing power to redistribute earnings to achieve
a variety of social reforms. Politicians love those indirect business
taxes, 'cause it hides the cost of government. During the New Deal days,
an under-secretary of the treasury, told the Congress -- indeed wrote a
book in which he said that taxes can serve a higher purpose than just
raising revenue. He said they could be an instrument of social and
economic control to redistribute the wealth and income and to penalize
particular industries and economic groups.
We need to put an
end to that. We need a simplification of the tax structure. We need an
indexing of the surtax brackets, a halt to government's illicit
profiting through inflation. It's as simple as this: every time the
cost-of-living index goes up one percent, government's revenue goes up
one and one-half percent. And above all we need an overall cut in the
cost of government. Government spending isn't a stimulant to the
economy; it's a drag on the economy. Only a decade ago, about 15 percent
of corporate gross income was required to pay the interest on corporate
debt; now it's 40 percent. Individuals and families once spent about 8
percent of their disposable income on interest on consumer debt -- the
installment buying, mortgage, and so forth. Today, it's almost
one-fourth of their total earnings. State and local government in the
last 15 years has gone from $70 billion to $220 billion. The total
private and public debt is growing four times as fast as the output of
goods and services.
Again, there's
something we can do. I don't know, has Jack [Kemp] been here yet in this
series or is he coming?
President Roche:
He's coming
Governor Reagan:
He's coming. Well, you'll be treated to Jack Kemp -- used to quarterback
for the Buffalo Bills, and now he's a Congressman from New York. He has
a bill before the Congress. It is designed to increase productivity, to
create jobs for people, and it's as simple as this: It calls for over a
three-year period reducing, across-the-board, the income tax for all of
us by a full one-third. And also, it would reduce the corporate tax from
48 to 45 percent. The base income tax would no longer be 20 it would be
14 percent, and the ceiling would be 50 percent instead of 70, and it
would double the exemption for smaller businesses before they get into
the surtax bracket.
It would do all
the things that we need to provide investment capital, and to increase
productivity and create jobs. We can say this with assurance because
it's been done twice before: in the '20's under Coolidge and again in
the '60's under John F. Kennedy. In the '60's the stimulant to the
economy was so immediate that even government's revenues increased
because of the broadening base of the economy. But the Congress, the
majority is concerned with further restrictions on our freedom, land
planning that threatens the very concept of private ownership, the
Humphrey-Hawkins bill which would regulate this economy into an extent
that has never been practiced outside of socialist or totalitarian
power. In my own state of California, the legislature's talking about
using tax funds to establish a stated-owned bank to compete with private
banks.
Well, Jack Kemp's
bill has been voted down. He's brought it up five times and the majority
in Congress has voted it down., but every time more come across the
aisle and vote with him. The last time he had 195 votes and he's getting
ready to put it up for the sixth time. Again, if the people will make
their wants known to Congress, you'll get what you want. You see it
isn't necessary to make Congress see the light. Just make them feel the
heat.
Well, I've talked
about the communications we need. We can't let the doctor remain alone
in his lonely fight against socialized medicine, or the oil industry
fight its own battle against divestiture or crippling controls,
repressive taxes; or the farmer who hurts more than most because of
government harassment and rule changing in the middle of the game. All
of these issues concern each one of us regardless of what our trade or
our profession may be. Corporate America must begin to realize that it
has allies in the independent businessmen and women and the shopkeepers,
the craftsmen, the farmers, and the professions. All these men and women
are organized in a great variety of ways. But we talk within our own
organizations about our own problems -- the drug industry for itself.
What we need is a liaison between these organizations to realize how
much strength we as a people still have, if we'll use that strength.
I mentioned oil.
Is there anyone that isn't concerned with the energy problem? Government
caused that problem while we all stood by unaware that we were involved.
Unnecessary regulations and prices imposed -- price limits -- back in
the '50's are the direct cause of today's crisis. Our crisis isn't
because of a shortage of fuel; it's a surplus of government. Now we have
a new agency -- we have a new agency of enormous power -- 20,000
employees and a 10 and 1/2 billion dollar budget. That's more than the
gross earnings of the top seven oil companies in the United States. And
that's just to start with. It is nothing more than a first step toward
nationalization of the oil industry.
And, you know,
when they tell us about the conservation -- of course we should save. No
one should waste a natural resource. But they act as if we've found all
the oil and gas there is to be found in this continent, if not the
world. Do you know that 57 years ago our government told us we only had
enough for 15 years? And nineteen years went by and they told us we only
had enough left for 13 more years. Now, we've done a lot of driving
since then and we'll do a lot more if government would do one simple
thing: get out of the way and let the incentives of the marketplace urge
the industry out to find the sources of energy this country needs.
You know, it has
been said that politics is the second oldest profession, and I've come
to realize over the last few years, it bears a great similarity to the
first. Why can't we look at other nations that have chosen this path of
government intervention before us? Our British cousins, they're where
we'll be in 15 years if we continue on the present course -- if we have
that much time. For 40 years Sweden has been held up to us as an example
that socialism really will work. There's an enlightened country, they
say, and look how well they're doing. Well, it was just a little over a
year ago that the Swedes went to the polls and voted against Karl Marx.
I think, maybe, the straw that broke the camel's back was a change in
the income tax laws. They changed the tax to read that at 33,000 dollars
of earnings, the tax rate was 102 percent.
We've had enough
of sideline kibitzers telling us the system which they themselves have
thrown out of sync with their social tinkering can be improved or saved
if we'll only have more of that tinkering or even government planning
and management. They play fast and loose with a system that for 200
years made us the light of the world; the refuge for people from all
over the world who just yearn to breathe free. You heard the moving
story of the woman who came through two countries and finally to this
country.
It's time we
recognized that the system, no matter what our problems are, has never
failed us once. Every time we have failed the system, usually by lacking
faith in it, usually by saying we have to change and do something else.
If you want an example of the power of this system, the government told
us a short time ago that the new poverty level in the United States was
5,500 dollars of earnings. At 5,500 dollars you are living in poverty in
America. 5,500 dollars is eight times as high as the average standard of
living for the rest of the world.
A Supreme Court
Justice has said the time has come, indeed is long overdue, for the
wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled
against those who would destroy it.
What specifically
should be done? The first essential for the businessman is to confront
the problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management. It's
been said that history is the patter of silken slippers descending the
stairs and the thunder of hob-nail boots coming up. Back through the
years we have seen people fleeing the thunder of those boots to seek
refuge in this land. And now too many of them, like the lady from Cuba,
have seen signs, the signs that were ignored in their homeland before
the end came, signs appearing here. They wonder if they'll have to flee
again, but they know there is no place to run to. Will we, before it is
too late, use the vitality and the magic of the marketplace to save this
way of life, or will we one day face our children, and our children's
children when they ask us where we were and what we were doing on the
day that freedom was lost?
Thank you very
much. |
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