Oregon Elephant

President Reagan weighs in on health care

Reagan talks on health care...he talks about national health insurance, socialized medicine, "sticking a foot in the door"...

Here is a snippet, talking about the dangers of the "slippery slope" inherent in government control of healthcare:

But let's also look from the other side, at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it's like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren't equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can't live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.  This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.

Everyone should listen to this.  Even years after his death, Reagan still leads.

The Greatest Republican, Abraham Lincoln - and some great Lincoln quotes for the times we're in

I’ve been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals – The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  It strikes me…we as Republicans spend a significant amount of time talking about Ronald Reagan…and I’m a great admirer of his.  However, I don’t really hear much mention at all of the greatest Republican (and greatest President), Abraham Lincoln.  I think this is a shame. 

 

While we should honor President Reagan as a great President, let’s never forget that we will always be “the party of Lincoln.” 

 

Here are a few of my favorite quotes of his, selected because they seem to be especially timely:

·         "I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong."

·         "I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end... I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me."

·        " The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."

If the stimulus was nothing but tax cuts...why it still wouldn't be a conservative bill

Let's say the stimulus bill was nothing but tax cuts (no "public investment"...in other words, spending)...let's say the $250 billion or so in tax cuts was all that was in the bill...would it then be a bill conservatives could support?  After all, tax cuts is what we're about right?

No way.

Tax cuts are like dessert...we all like them, and certainly we can agree we pay too much in taxes.  But for a conservative, the meat and potatoes of their philosophy is limited government.  If you finance a $250 billion tax cut by increasing your debt, what's the point of that?  The conservative answer is to first trim the size and scope of government (so that government only does what it must).  Then, as the size of government shrinks, there is less revenue needed to keep it solvent.  Then, taxes go down as a matter of course, because you need less money. 

The big problem with the tax cuts under both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is that spending, instead of going down, went up precipitiously.  In the case of Reagan, it was in spite of his best efforts.  You can't say that about Bush. 

Thinking of Reagan...

I'm not usually one to look backwards, but I was listening this morning, to Ronald Reagan's famous "A Time for Choosing" speech, given in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater. In speaking about the greatly-expanding government and rapidly higher levels of taxation occuring at the time, he said:

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." But they have been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves--and all of the things that I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations.

• For example, they have voices that say "the cold war will end through acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism."
• Another voice says that the profit motive has become outmoded, it must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state; or our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century.
• 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 said he is hobbled in his task by the restrictions in power imposed on him by this antiquated document. He must be freed so that he can do for us what he knows is best.
• And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government."

Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the free man and woman of this country--as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "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.

So the next time someone says "this is just a time when the government needs to be more involved"...think of this.