Dichroic Reflections

As I said, he could have been worse.

Good heavens.

The following, which I found over at Fresh Bilge: A Salty Journal, is from a speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1964, supporting Barry Goldwater:

Senator [J. William] Fulbright [D., Ark.] 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 Sen. [Joseph] 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. 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.

I can't draw any conclusions about Reagan as President from this; a man who had switched parties a decade before would certainly be able to alter his opinions in the following deacde and a half. But it certainly says a lot about the current news. For one thing, I'm glad Fulbright isn't currently in politics. More important is what it says about corruption by power. As I recall, LBJ was President at the time. And so there they were, wanting to remove the checks and balances restraining their man. Now the Republicans are in power, making similar claims. Once again, I can only thank the Framers of the Constitution for giving us a government not easily alterable by any party in power.