Thank you for your prayers. Nancy and I have felt their presence many times in many ways. I believe in intercessionary prayer. And St. Peter, after doing all the necessary formalities, took them in hand to show them where their quarters would be. And he took them to a small, single room with a bed, a chair, and a table and said this was for the clergyman.
And the politician was a little worried about what might be in store for him. Peter stopped in front of a beautiful mansion with lovely grounds… many servants, and told him that these would be his quarters. And yes, we need your help to keep us ever mindful of the ideas and the principles that brought us into the public arena in the first place. The basis of those ideals and principles is… a commitment to freedom and personal liberty that, itself is grounded in the much deeper realization that freedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly mispronounces and corrects himself sought and humbly accepted.
America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. Only through your work and prayers and those of millions of others can we hope to survive this perilous century and keep alive this experiment in liberty, this last, best hope of man. No matter how well intentioned, their value system is radically different from that of most Americans. Sometimes their voices are louder than ours, but they are not yet a majority.
How far are they willing to go in giving to government their prerogatives as parents? An organization of citizens, sincerely motivated, deeply concerned about the increase in illegitimate births and abortions involving girls well below the age of consent, some time ago established a nationwide network of clinics to offer help to these girls and, hopefully, alleviate this situation. Now, again, let me say, I do not fault their intent.
However, in their well-intentioned effort, these clinics decided to provide advice and birth control drugs and devices to underage girls without the knowledge of their parents. In providing for this, the Congress decreed that every effort would be made to maximize parental participation.
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.
I had someplace to escape to. 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-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. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state. 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.
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 , the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85 percent of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21 percent 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.
But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have , 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, 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. On This Day: Marshall University football team killed in plane crash. Taylor Lautner announces engagement to nurse Tay Dome. Queen Elizabeth misses Remembrance Day because of back sprain. Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci saw selves in 'Yellowjackets' cast.
He refocused the nation on values and traditions such as family and work and he bore the heavy responsibilities of the presidency for eight long years. For all of these reasons, we as a nation should be appreciative. But our appreciation should not extend to rewriting history. The lessons that a nation must learn from its history are far too important to allow it to be rewritten for the benefit of any man.
Yet, I have been tempted to check the dates of Ronald Reagan's presidency in the history books when I listened to recent television and press coverage of his accomplishments and legacy.
To be certain January to was a period of momentous change — but it would be difficult for individuals of any persuasion or political affiliation to argue that all of that change was positive. Here are some examples:. The Reagan administration pushed the nation into one of the greatest constitutional crises of the 20th century when it was revealed that the country had engaged in a secret and illegal war in Central America.
The president escaped impeachment proceedings on the basis that it was plausible that he was unaware of the illegal war and the means by which it had been financed. The U. Bond traders began unloading U. Treasuries in August and the collapse of bond prices was quickly followed by a decline in stock prices.
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