San Francisco, July 20, 1974:
[excerpts]
“I welcome you to California, to this city here of ours on the Bay, San Francisco.
“You know I have become a student of Greek history. I have learned that there was an ancient Greek city-state that had a custom that anyone who proposed a new law or program for government did so with a noose around his neck and standing on a chair, with the other end tied to a tree. If they liked the proposal he made, they removed the noose; if they didn’t, they removed the chair. I have developed a morbid fascination for the customs of ancient Greece.”
“Now I know you didn’t come here to listen to a politician tell you about his troubles. You are absolutely right, so I am going to talk about yours, which seems fair enough because a lot of your troubles seem caused by people in my present line of work.”
– On Barry Goldwater Years –
“A decade has passed since Barry Goldwater walked a lonely path across this land, speaking truths that needed to be heard. His voice was raised trying to rekindle in our country all thegreat ideals and principles that set our nation apart from all others that preceded us. But louder and more strident voices uttered easily sold clichés, cartoons with acid-tipped pens ridiculed and ranted. Barry Goldwater’s unforgivable sin ten years ago was simply and honestly to speak his mind.
“He thought that free enterprise was in danger from excessive government and he said so. He thought that some Americans were too complacent about the threats of Communism and he said so.”
“Shortly after the 1964 election, I am sure you have heard this one about the young man who said, ‘I was told that if I voted for Barry Goldwater we would be in war in six months. I did and we are.‘
“Ten years ago the Postmaster General said, ‘We know what Senator Goldwater is talking about—extremism, his hate and divisiveness. It is spitting on the ambassador to the United Nation.‘ A labor leader drew a parallel between Goldwater and Hitler. The Governor of California said,‘The stench of Fascism is in the air.‘ The National Democratic Chairman said, ‘the Republican platform of Goldwater is an exercise in fantasy, fear, and hate.‘ The publisher of a paper that prints all the news fit to print warned that the kind of backing that Goldwater had was the kind of business backing behind the Nazis in the early 30’s.
“A national columnist [speaking against Barry Goldwater’s conservatism] pointed out that all the tyrants in history from Caesar and Napoleon to Hitler and Stalin, acted in the name ofliberty and justice. All this and more was spewed forth because the man [Barry Goldwater] pledged to support the Constitution of the United States, and felt called upon to remind us that even a land as rich as ours can’t go on forever borrowing against the future, leaving a legacy of debt for another generation; that inflation could reduce the standards of living for an entire generation that had no part in the folly; that if young Americans were asked to fight and die for their country it should be for a cause worth winning and they should be allowed to win it as quickly as possible.
“It is well for us to be reminded of the hate-filled rhetoric that was spewed forth over such a long period of time about that pleasant, patriotic and courageous man and how uncalled-for it seems now as we look back.”
– On Economic Troubles We’re In –
“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.
“Government, as you know, in its answers to the problems, is somewhat less than a howling success, particularly when government involves itself in things that are not in its proper province. And we don’t have to talk theoretically; we could look, for example, to one of the Iron Curtain countries where government is in complete charge. There is nothing to interfere with its carrying out its dreams of regimentation and regulation.”
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“We live in the only country in the World where it takes more intelligence just to figure out your income tax, than it does to earn an income.
“The essence of the American Revolution was a system that produced a limited governmentand the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society, and free men were released to perform such miracles of invention, construction and production as the world had never seen. One half of all the economic activity in the entire history of mankind has taken place in these two centuries under American auspices. Our system of free enterprise, spark-plugged by the hope of economic reward, has lifted more burdens from the backs of more people than any other system the world has ever known.”
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“And still a great many people have lost faith in our economic system and for that matter we have lost faith in ourselves.”
“Our traditional concept of states’ rights and local autonomy has been distorted; but much worse, the people’s relationship with government has been dramatically altered.
“I think something that illustrates this is a story that appeared in a column in an Eastern newspaper not too long ago. It had to do with a welfare recipient who had a part-time job on a farm:
One day he yielded to temptation and stole a smoked ham out of the farmer’s smokehouse. He took it to the grocer and sold it to him for $27. Then he took $20 of the $27 and bought $80 worth of food stamps which he was eligible to do by virtue of being on welfare. Then he took $29 worth of food stamps and bought the ham back. He put the ham back in the smokehouse and he bought $51 worth of groceries. Then, the columnist said, the grocer had made a profit, the farmer had his ham back, the welfare recipient ended up with $7 in cash and $51 in groceries, with no one being the loser.”
“It is no wonder that our people are in their season of discontent.”
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“Government by the people only works if the people work at it.”
“Now there are some people in this country who accepted the land planning bill as an environmental protection bill and there are others—most of them—who were not aware that such a bill was even before Congress. The truth is, that bill was a threat to the entire traditional concept of private ownership of land, a threat greater than anything that has ever been proposed in these 200 years, and that fact was not understood by some of the Congressmen who voted for it. … our fears were justified, for when the bill was passed he said, ‘of course you realize that once it is passed we have no way of controlling it when it then goes into a bureau or agency of government that will implement it,’ and that’s what we had been trying to tell them all the time.”
“And so we are governed by an ever-increasing bureaucracy made up of people who were never elected to office and can’t be removed from office by voters. Regulations are spawned in the multitudes.”
“This is where we must begin the fight back, if free enterprise and freedom itself is to survive.”
“Does anyone truly believe that we can socialize the doctor without socializing the patient?”
“Daniel Webster was right when he said, ‘every generation there are those who want to rule well, but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.’ ”
[“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” — Daniel Webster]
“In his latest volume “ECONOMICS AND THE PUBLIC PURPOSE”, John Kenneth Galbreath asserts that the market arrangements of our economy have given us inadequate housing, terrible mass transit, poor health care, etc., etc. and socialism is inevitable. I believe this is the first time Mr. Galbreath, in his talk of the affluent society [the one percent], has finally come out in his declaration and admitted that socialism is what he has in mind.”
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“We’ve got to have the confidence, that the people can understand if they are given access to the facts.Ignorance is the only thing we have to fear, ignorance that permits the modern day populace to gain a following for their philosophy of redistribution. We have to communicate not just with each other, we have to communicate with the people who are the customers and with the people who are the laborers, the workers.”
“We must recognize that an assault on one particular industry is an assault on all. We have to make them understand we are all in the same boat together and if we wait until it is aimed expressly at just one particular segment before we start fighting back, then we are really in trouble, because the ongoing struggle is for survival of the free market system.”
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“We have been fighting a kind of a defensive, rear guard action. Step by step we have retreated much farther than we know. Too many people blame business for inflation and look to government for the answer. Government is not the answer to our problems, government is the problem.”
“The policy of redistribution of the output of an economy that’s already too small is based on the fallacy that we can eliminate poverty by giving everyone more money, higher wages, bigger welfare checks, pensions and social security and increased unemployment insurance to increase the purchasing power. The fact is, we can only live better by producing more goods and services for each other. Money is no good if there is nothing there to buy. For too long a time our belief in jobs for everyone is the answer, at the same time that we keep negotiating higher and higher pay for a lower output, has only contributed to inflation.”
– The Idea ! –
“I have urged a more aggressive policy of fighting government harassment, opposing the status quo and the collectivists, who would replace the free market with a planned economy.”
“Let us ask the heads of industry and business in America for a meeting with the heads of the communications media to see if they are truly aware that you can’t have a free press unless you have a free economy at the same time.
“I reiterate all these suggestions but of late I have been wondering if there is not something more that would put us on the offensive. It is not enough to fight the stupidity of the Karl Marx theory by talking the free market theory. Have we neglected the most potent weapon in our arsenal, the use of the free enterprise system itself in behalf of a broader cross section of citizens? We are beset by vexing problems and we can’t deny the problems result from government action, but to complain as I have been doing, and then wait for the same government that created the problem in the first place to do an about-face and come up with solutions, is a little fruitless. You can’t lick something with nothing, just to complain that the answer is wrong. We must go to them and say ‘we’ve got a better idea’.”
“Take Social Security for a starter, most of them are scared to even mention it, but it is about as potent right now and destructive a time bomb as we have ticking away at the foundations of our free society. More than one-half of the taxpayers pay more social security than they do income tax. When it started, the average citizen paid about $3 for every $100 he could save over and above taxes and the cost of living. Today, it is taking $84 of every $100 that he can mange to save. If a private insurance company attempted to sell a plan that cost so much and paid so little, they would be put in jail.
“The average worker today is losing some $200,000 that would be his if the same amount could be invested in private productive plans.”
“Worse, the ratio of earners to retirees is dropping to the point that one day it will be one on one.
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“The simple fact is the United States Social Security system is bankrupt. It has been bankrupt for 20 years but this has been concealed by an 800 percent increase in the payroll tax without a matching increase in benefits. Now politicians so far have provided no answers and you can bet that the Social Security bureaucracy is pretending that if it doesn’t look, the problem will go away. Unfortunately, when the roof falls in it is going to fall on all of us.”
“At the same time, we find a plan that will restore equity to the present-day workers.
“In our resistance to what some see as a creeping socialism, we have just theorized about the superiority of capitalism. Have we really made capitalism work to prove these benefits can do everything for everybody better than the promises of the populous of the socialist? All they can offer with their system, if you analyze it, is to take from the haves and give to the have-nots. That doesn’t eliminate have-nots, it just changes them around.
“But capitalism can work to make everyone a “have”.
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“Over [one] hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. There was a wide distribution of land and they didn’t confiscate anyone’s already privately owned land. They did not take from those who owned to give to others who did not own. It set the pattern for the American capitalistic system. We need an Industrial Homestead Act. There are business leaders today who are exploring this kind of modern homestead plan [i.e. Capital Homesteading for every citizen]. They range from government allowing the corporate tax to go directly to the people [who own new shares as dividends], that 50% percent of the earnings of the corporations that now is a tax to the government, some of them suggest: ‘Why don’t you distribute equally and equitably to the people to be used as each individual chooses, rather than having it spent on their behalf by government bureaucrats?’
“It goes further than that, to a more sophisticated scheme that business has been toying with, increasing the worker, and citizen, investment in corporate America.
“I know that plans have been suggested in the past that all had this flaw, they were based on making the present owners give up some of their ownership to the non-owners. Now this isn’t true of the ideas that are being talked today. Very simply these business leaders have come to the realization that it is time to formulate a plan to accelerate the economic growth andproduction, at the same time we broaden the ownership of productive capital with the future and new shares of industrial output.
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“The American dream has always been to have a piece of the action. Income, you know, results from only two things, it can result from capital or it can result from labor. If the worker and citizen begins getting his income from both sources at once he has a real stake in increasing production and increasing the output. One such plan is based on financing futureexpansion in such a way as to create a stock ownership culture. It does not reduce the holdings of the present owners, nor does it require the employees to divert their own [past] savings into stock purchases. This one plan, and undoubtedly there are alternatives, utilizes an employee stock ownership trust to purchase newly issued stock when a corporation needsnew capital for expansion. The trust acquires its funds by borrowing with a guarantee from the corporation, from a commercial bank or other lending institution. Over a ten-year period it is possible for [estimates $21 trillion+] of newly formed capital to be owned by individuals and families who today have little or no hope of acquiring a vested interest in our capitalistic system.”
“What better answer could we have to socialism? What an export item on the world market. What argument could a foreign land have against a corporation which made its ‘have-not’citizens into ‘haves’?”
[Perhaps, that’s were ‘Every Citizen an Owner’, makes sense.]
“In short, I am suggesting that we face a choice between government that has grown desperate, embarking on a course that leads to confiscation and redistribution, or using the great talent and expertise of the private sector to spread legitimate capital participation in free enterprise to those who now are only property-less employees.”
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“In 1878 Senator Hill said, ‘I do not dread industrial corporations as instruments of power to destroy this country, but one corporation we may well all dread. That corporation is the federal government. If this great, ambitious, ever-growing corporation becomes oppressive, who shall check it? If it becomes too wayward, who shall control it? If it becomes unjust, who shall trust it? Watch and guard with sleepless dread, that corporation which can make all property and rights, all states and people, all liberty and hope its playthings in an hour, and its victims forever.’
“Yesterday, I told those distinguished business leaders and I will tell you, even at your youthful age, whatever you do, don’t risk having to face your children or your children’s children some day when they ask, ‘where were you and what were you doing on the day that freedom was lost?’ ”
-Ronald Reagan, Speech-Young Americans for Freedom, July 1974.
Posted by Guy C. Stevenson: Investment, Registered Representative for 28 years. Retirement Income Planning, Estate Planning, Pension Design and Implementation. SWS Financial Services. GC Stevenson & Associates LLC.
Research and original source copy provided by Dr. Norman Kurland CESJ, then the Washington D.C. chief for: Kelso, Cotton, Seligman & Ray – Corporate Finance Attorneys. Architects of ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plans)
