“A Time for Choosing”
Fourty-five years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave his magnificient speech “A Time for Choosing”, as part of a pre-recorded TV program. It was also then used as Goldwater’s nomination speech.
It was an awesome speech. It’s even better when you make a few changes:
- Remove the Goldwater references
- Change references of “millions of dollars” to “billions of dollars”
- Change references of “billions of dollars” to “trillions of dollars”
Do these things, and 99% of that speech can be directly applied today, and the points Reagan made are still valid. We’re still fighting the devaluation of our dollar. The problems and government waste and fraud potential he laid out about the then-nascent welfare state are still in effect. Government meddling in the farming sector of our economy is still a massive problem. The absurdity and fiscal debtedness of Social Security is even more evident today than it was in 1964, when it was still in debt to the tune of approximately 230 billion dollars (As an aside, the facts he lays out about how the governemnt during a supreme court case admitted that that the SS funds were in fact just general government revenue, to be used as they decided, lays bare the entire structure of the Social Security program)
There’s more, but I wouldn’t want to ruin it. I will say that there is an oblique reference to the system of negative rights in the constitution, when he’s describing how some socialists were aggreived at the constitution because it limited what they could do “to the masses” (a term of great derision for Reagan, for good reason)