What this Election is About

"This is the issue in 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 capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves" – Ronald Reagan, Speech in support of Barry Goldwater, 1964

“The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States. Those ideas are still very much with us. We are all of us imbued with them. They are part of the very fabric of our being. But we have been straying from them. We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.

“Fortunately, we are waking up. We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can not be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.

“Fortunately, also, we are as a people still free to choose which way we should go – whether to continue along the road we have been following to ever bigger government, or to call a halt and change direction.” - Milton Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979

“Back in 1927 an American Socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket said the American people would never vote for Socialism, but under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program…

“If you don’t [oppose the government takeover of healthcare] this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other Federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day…we will awake to find that we have Socialism. And if you don’t do this, and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” – Ronald Reagan, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine”, 1961

“The West has come to regard the values of freedom – the yardstick of human rights – as something Western. Many of them, especially in Europe, take the values and the institutions of freedom – the institutions of science, freedom, curiosity, the individual – I mean the rule of law, they've come to take them so for granted that they're either not aware of the threat against it, they're not aware of the fact that you have to sustain day be day, as is with all man-made things. I mean if this building, the roof will leak and the paint will fall and you have to repaint it, you have to maintain it all the time. It seems that people have forgotten that. And perhaps part of the reason is because the generation that's now enjoying all these freedoms in the West is not the generation that built it. These are generations that inherited it. And like companies, family companies often you'll see, for those of you who are interested in economics, the first generation and the second generation are almost always more passionate about the brand and the family company and keeping it all in the family; and then the third generation live, use, take the money and they're either overtaken by bigger companies, swallowed up, or they go bankrupt; and I think that there is an analogy there in that the generations after the Second World War living today in Europe – the United States may be different but I'm here much too short to say anything about that – is that they are people who are so complacent, they've always been free – they just no longer know what freedom costs.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2007

“You know what I think the Tea Party is all about. These people are angry, these people are frustrated, and these people are upset, because they believe that this Obama administration is taking their freedom away, taking their liberty away. We don’t let anybody do that.” – Rudy Giuliani, Campaign Stop for Kelly Ayotte, 2010

“Freedom doesn't come like a bird on the wing
It doesn't come down like the summer rain
Freedom, freedom is a hard won thing
You've got to work for it, fight for it
Day and night for it
And every generation got to win it again” – Pass It On, old Trade Union Song