Remarks By Governor Ronald Reagan To Young Americans For Freedom
San Francisco, July 20, 1974
“Right now American business and industry are in the deepest trouble they have ever been in, in our Nation’s entire history. A large percentage of the people in this country today lay all their troubles at the door of business. The word profit is synonymous with evil as well the term “private property” and therefore personal freedom, freedom of choice for everybody, is in danger. Profit, property and freedom are inseparable, you can’t have any one of them without the other two.
“For a long time now we haven’t been taught enough economics in our schools and sometimes I am amazed at all of you, I don’t know how you have held out against what has been a consistent program of indoctrination, particularly through our educational system, and how you have avoided the economic illiteracy that is widespread. The result has been, however, that self-seeking demagogues have been able to take advantage of this–not of you but of those others. Investors, workers and consumers have been divided to the point that we have forgotten we are all vital components of something called free enterprise, totally dependent upon each other. If the public’s lack of understanding is not soon corrected the public may soon do great and irreparable harm to itself by demanding more interference than we already have of government.”
While President Reagan has on numerous occasions stated his support broadened private, individual ownership of productive capital assets held by business corporations, Reagan and the Republican Party never acted on these stated objectives.
The reform of the “system,” as binary economist Louis Kelso postulated, “must be structured so that eventually all citizens produce an expanding proportion of their income through their privately owned productive capital and simultaneously generate enough purchasing power to consume the economy’s output.”
What we really need in this 2012 presidential election year is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable capital estate.
We need a recognition in America that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
What needs to be adjusted is the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.
The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
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