California Globe Year End: A Time for Choosing in 2024

In 1964, Ronald Reagan endorsed Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in the race for United States President in a now-famous speech, “A Time For Choosing.”

His words resonate today more than ever as Americans are truly facing a rendezvous with destiny and a time for choosing – what does America’s future look like? Will it be the bastion of freedom the founding fathers envisioned or are we already too far along on the march into socialism?

In the speech Reagan warned:

If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth… 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.

Reagan identified the choices between the two candidates, Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson.

…a vote for the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, called for a weakened economy, more regulations, inflation, a war on profit incentives, and the promotion of the welfare state.  It meant an acceptance of “The Great Society,” the expansion of a centralized government, and a ruling class of politicians and unelected bureaucrats, that would pick winners and losers, and dictate how its citizens should live their lives.  “The full power of centralized government — this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize.

Reagan diminished the party divisions, and said the real division was between freedom and totalitarianism:

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.

Reagan’s speech message included the need for strong national defense, anti-Communism ideology, and the ever-important need to protect the average working American from increasing taxes and the growing permanent bureaucracy.

Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we’re always “against” things – we’re never “for” anything.

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.

Reagan’s speech evoked the conservative movement in the Republican Party, which some say pared-down the influence of the establishment arm of the Party.

It’s unsettling how prescient his words are today.

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.

Again, his message is astute – we are also being told we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people.

Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. 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.” He must “be freed,” so that he “can do for us” what he knows “is best.” Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.”

…”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.

Shamefully, we find ourselves, 60 years later, at nearly the same place, thanks in large part to the establishment arm of the Republican Party, and the greedy, corrupt left. We indeed are faced with a time for choosing.

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. 

What is astounding, is that even in 1964, Reagan exposed the Social Security con game, which he noted was already $298 billion dollars in the hole, and how it was created with a lie:

Now, we’re for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we’ve accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.

But we’re against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They’ve called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they’re doing just that.

He exposed the socialism of the Social Security system, and how forcing people into it was unsound and “lacking in business sense” which would lead to a fund one day which would not be able to meet its obligations:

I think we’re against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They’ve come to the end of the road.

Reagan warned that we are subordinating American interests to an organization [UN] that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world’s population.

Reagan said governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. And prophetically said a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth. 

Regan warned of the permanent damage with perpetual wars:

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

And magnificently, Ronald Reagan, in 1964 said:

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

Here we find ourselves again on the precipice of a rendezvous with destiny and a real time for choosing again: Freedom and self-governing, or the expansion of a centralized government; energy independence or economic catastrophe; capitalism, private ownership, free markets, or socialism, communism and Marxism; individual responsibility or individual mandate.

When Ronald Reagan accepted the Republican Party nomination for President at the National Convention in 1980, he told us where and how the country under President Jimmy Carter and Democrats had gone awry:

First we must overcome something the present Administration has cooked up: a new and altogether indigestible economic stew, one part inflation, one part high unemployment, one part recession, one part runaway taxes, one part deficit spending and seasoned by an energy crisis. Its an economic stew that has turned the national stomach. 

and that he would lead the restoration of the United States to its greatness for its people:

The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves. Those who believe we can have no business leading the nation. I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose. We have come together here because the American people deserve better from those to whom they entrust our nations highest offices, and we stand united in our resolve to do something about it. 

It is again a time for choosing in 2024.