Reagan Right on Government Powers

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – It only takes three or four percent a year for a couple of years without wages going up to where there is a serious lack of disposable income and maybe even survival income.  Ladies and gentlemen, that’s where we are.  That’s why there are no savings in the banks.  That’s why there’s no capital to start small businesses or to contribute to small businesses.  Trust me, I try to raise capital for a small business.  It’s difficult.  The reason is because inflation and debt and deficit are eating that capital.  As Reagan said, you think you can borrow from the future and use it today for your pleasure?  Yeah, you can do that for a short time.  It is a miracle that it hasn’t crashed already.

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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President Ronald Reagan: It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people.

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Mike:  Wow!  Stop it right there.  That’s all I needed to hear.  That guy sounds like me, or I sound like that guy.  Where is that?  Where is that to be found?  Where do you find that at?  With all due respect to the former governor of Massachusetts, he does not sound like that.  There are few among us that sound like that, but you do hear that.  Can you believe 31 years removed from President Reagan’s inaugural address, and that’s what you just heard part of, can you believe that today we find ourselves in close quarters with friends, allegedly of our own party and of our own persuasion, who do not believe in what he just said about the states, and who do not believe that the consent of the governed is what grants government power?

Therefore, your Supremacy Clause, which they love to run around and ram up our you-know-what’s, shove in our faces, and demand that we live by it, that that Supremacy Clause only bears weight in powers that have been granted by consent.  If we do not grant the power to tax in the disguise of a mandate for healthcare, they cannot exercise it.  They do not have the just authority.  Devoid of partisanship is how I would describe Reagan’s address there.  There is no incrimination for the other party there, although ultimately he did have to stand up to Tip O’Neill and his buddies in the House to get the tax cuts through.

The grave mistake that was made by the Reagan administration — and there was a lot of Goldwater’s “I do not intend to make a deal with the federal government; I intend to eliminate it” 1964 speech.  Reagan still had it 16 years later.  He was still a true believer.  Eight years in the White House would temper that and convince him the futility of some of it.  It would cause him remorse, but it wasn’t because he didn’t go in with the proper mindset.  Anyone that says President Reagan was not one of us, us little government guys, nullifiers, Ninth Amendment, Tenth Amendment, us [r]epublicans, is just smoking crack.

The main reason I wanted to play that is because in the next part of the speech, he talks about tax rates and about how it is inequitable.  You don’t have a free society if one citizen is punished by his government because he’s successful more than another.  That is not equity.  That is not we the people with liberty and justice for all.  That’s the exact opposite.  That is a liberty and justice by choice.  I would say that the equation has gotten tilted towards the wealthy, but it’s not because of the tax code.  It is because of the corporatism.  It is because of the banksters.  It is because of their use of the law as a tool to gain wealth.  Not necessarily the tax law, but subsidy law, the bank insurances law.  You name the financial scourge of today and it’s because of that.  That is how they have inured so much wealth to themselves and why it seems like the little guy — well, the little guy gets clobbered by inflation.

It only takes three or four percent a year for a couple of years without wages going up to where there is a serious lack of disposable income and maybe even survival income.  Ladies and gentlemen, that’s where we are.  That’s why there are no savings in the banks.  That’s why there’s no capital to start small businesses or to contribute to small businesses.  Trust me, I try to raise capital for a small business.  It’s difficult.  The reason is because inflation and debt and deficit are eating that capital.  As Reagan said, you think you can borrow from the future and use it today for your pleasure?  Yeah, you can do that for a short time.  It is a miracle that it hasn’t crashed already.

One final word on this.  The great Robert Higgs, writing at the Independent two days ago, now that we’re all ginned up, we heard President Reagan, here is the size of the challenge.  Higgs wrote this, “What Crusaders for Liberty Are Up Against.”

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If you were setting out to organize a crusade to “restore the American Republic” or some such, you would need to know what sort of people you are trying to enlist in your movement.  I have drawn up two short lists to assist you: Fourteen things in which many Americans have an interest and fourteen things in which few Americans have an interest.

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Mike:  Which list would you like first?  AG, which one do you want first, the ones people have an interest in or the ones they don’t?

AG:  The ones they don’t.

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Fourteen things in which few Americans have an interest: liberty; growth of the state; abuse of state power; out-of-control police; sending millions of young blacks to prison, many for victimless crimes; impending financial breakdown of the welfare state; U.S. imperialism, except to root for it; aggressive U.S. wars, except to root for them; excessive government debt; excessive personal debt; living beyond their means; vulgarity that pervades popular culture; people’s general shamelessness on TV and elsewhere in public; saddling future generations with bills for current government outlays.

Here are fourteen things in which many Americans have an interest: shirking on the job; getting high; getting drunk; overeating; bad movies with lots of CGI and explosions; football and many other sports; God-awful “music”; gossip about celebrities and their weight, wardrobes and divorces; gossip about rich people and European aristocrats; fighting with their spouses; trouble with their kids; paying the bills; getting on disability, welfare of some sort; ways to avoid paying for their own medical care.

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End Mike Church Show Transcript