When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny.

Source: Thomas Jefferson

Topics: Uncategorized

Now I’m old enough to remember when the only experience you ever seemed to have with the Federal Government was that now and then you went down to the post office and bought a stamp. They were two cents each. For twice a day delivery. Now they are fifteen cents for once a day delivery to the wrong address. My friend Dewey Bartlett, the Senator from Oklahoma, says that the last two cents on the price is for storage. And he suggested that we could improve the postal service if we would start paying the postal employees by mail. And yet how much are we to blame? Beginning with the great traumatic experience of the depression, panic in the thirties, we ourselves have fallen into the habit of turning to the government more and more for answers the government has neither the ability nor the right to give. But government delights in trying to provide those answers because government, just any government, as an institution tends to grow.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Uncategorized

We’re governed more and more by a giant bureaucracy, a permanent body of public employees that cannot be removed from office by our votes, and which I tell you truly is determining policy in this nation to a far greater extent than those we send to the marble halls of government as our elected representatives. Today government says it is going to do something about inflation and they pretend that it’s something like the plague or a draught that it just came on use out of the atmosphere no one knows quite how it happened. The truth of the matter is the answer is very simple, inflation comes when government spends more than government takes in and it will go away when government stops doing that.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Uncategorized

There are 218 million Americans according to the census bureau. Today we’ve passed the half way mark. More than 124 million Americans are dependent on tax dollars for all or the major part of their daily living. There is a lack of understanding by a great many people of what has thrown this great free market system of ours out of sync. Political demagogues have created a political and economic mythology which is widely believed by otherwise well informed people. This has resulted in an intolerable interference in the marketplace by a government that is urged on by spokesman for a variety of causes, some worthy in themselves, but questionable as to whether they are a proper concern of government. Profit has become a dirty word, blamed for most of our social ills. Free enterprise is becoming far less free in the name of something called consumerism. Property rights are being eroded and even eliminated in the name of environmental protection. It is time for all of us to raise a collective voice reminding that profit, property rights and freedom are inseparable, and you can’t have the third unless you continue to be entitled to the first two.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Uncategorized

We’re so used to talking billions, does anyone know how much a billion really is? A billion minutes ago, Christ was walking on this earth. A billion hours ago our ancestors lived in caves and it is questionable as to whether they discovered the use of fire or not. If you gentlemen would send your wives out on a shopping spree and give each one of them a billion dollars, but tell them only to spend a thousand dollars a day, they wouldn’t be home for three thousand years. But a billion dollars in Washington was just nineteen hours ago. And they will spend another billion in the next nineteen hours and so on around the clock until the new budget is adopted and then it’s going to go up to about $1.4 billion a day.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Uncategorized

Freedom is not passed on to our children genetically in the bloodstream; it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. You and I will teach our children how to protect and guard freedom. Preserve it or freedom will disappear in that one generation. Already I fear that too many of us, particularly in business and industry, have switched rather than fight. Have the great corporations abdicated their responsibility to preserve the free marketplace possibly out of a reluctance to rock the boat, or more likely, a fear of retaliation? And I can’t deny, that’s a very legitimate fear. But one thing we are all going to have to realize is when we get in bed with government, we are going to get more than a good night’s sleep.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Uncategorized

Out in New Mexico some time ago, there was a little company, five employees, husband and wife owned it. She’s the president of the company. The other day two OSHA inspectors arrived at the door, wanted to make one of those searches, hunting expedition and if they found any violations they’d be automatically fined. Madam President said, “Where’s your warrant?” and they said, “We don’t need one.” She said, “You do to come in here.” And closed the door. Well they got a warrant and they came back. She had her lawyer with her and he read the warrant and he said it does not show probably cause and so the door was closed again. Well other people heard about the people in New Mexico. A fellow up in Pocatello, Idaho heard about it. He had thirty-five employees, a subcontractor in plumbing and electrical work, and he turned them away. Well they had heard about her too, they came back with a court order not a warrant. He defied it. Well the upside is, this old boy from a small business (against the advice of all his friends and family and everyone, even his lawyer) fought his case against that citation for contempt all the way to the Supreme Court. A week or so ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Paragraph 8A of the OSHA act violates the fourth amendment of the constitution and hereafter they will need a warrant to come into your place of business.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Uncategorized

Do we let the doctors continue their lonely fight against socialized medicine, or do we realize the common sense that if you socialize the doctor, you socialize the patient? All of these various issues are of concern to us because they are all an infringement on our liberty. We are organized in a variety of ways. Corporate America’s allies are the independent business men and women organizations — shopkeepers, craftsmen, farmers, and professionals. It is time that as groups, we start talking to each other. All of us have a stake in the energy industry, you perhaps feel more than most, but we all do. Government caused the energy problem. It claims it’s trying to solve it, but it imposed beginning about twenty years ago, regulations, price fixing and now has a new agency of 20,000 employees and a budget that in the first year will prorate out to ten cents a gallon for every gallon of gasoline we are going to buy. It is in truth the first step toward the nationalization of the energy industry. Our problem isn’t a shortage of fuel, our problem is a surplus of government. They have invoked panic. They’ve told us we are running out, we’ve found all the oil and the natural gas there is in the country. Does anyone remember that they told us that 57 years ago? The government told us in 1920 that we only had enough oil left for fifteen years. Nineteen years later, they told us we only had enough left for thirteen years. We’ve done a lot of driving since then. We will do a lot more if government will simply get out of the way and let the incentives of the marketplace go to work to inspire the energy industry to go out and find the fuel that we must have.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Uncategorized

In his memoirs, Arthur Crock, the former Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, said, “The United States merits the distinction of having discarded its past and its meaning in one of the briefest spans in modern history.” Why don’t we look at those other nations that chose the path of government intervention before us? The British parliament has been debating what to do about the steel industry. It’s nationalized, it’s theirs, it’s losing $20 million a week. In all the debate, no one on either side has suggested the most common sense, logical answer. Put it back out where it was in the private sector in private ownership where it wasn’t losing $20 million a week. Sweden has long been held up to view as proof that socialism will work. In 1976 the Swedes went to the polls and voted against Karl Marx. They voted out the Swedish Prime Minister. Probably the straw that broke the camel’s back was a change in the income tax rates. At $33,000 of earnings in Sweden, the tax rate is 102%. We’ve had enough of sideline kibitzers telling us this system, which they themselves have thrown out of sync with their social tinkering, can only be saved by more of the same until we have a total government planning and management of our lives. What I’ve really been trying to say, I suppose, is that government has legitimate functions, which it should perform, and it performs well. Our problem is when government goes outside its proper province and attempts to do those things which belong in private hands — that’s when we get in trouble.

Source: Ronald Reagan
1978 Automotive Age Western Dealers Conference

Topics: Central Planning; Income Tax

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