I’ve been posting a lot about Reagan, because I really admired him a lot. We libertarians have some serious beefs with Reagan, of course; we’ve made no secret of that. But he was a great man, an intelligent man, and I admired him despite my differences with him.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, where I work, would not exist had it not been for Ronald Reagan. When he was Governor of California, Reagan pushed an agenda of welfare reform which was attacked severely by leftist legal foundations. In a moment of frustration, he expressed his wish that there were a conservative legal group which would take on these leftist groups on their own turf. In response, a small group of lawyers who worked in various state government positions founded PLF, and several of these lawyers work at the Foundation today. (In fact, PLF’s receptionist, Sylvia, worked for several years as Reagan’s assistant personal secretary before joining the Foundation.)
As for me personally, I was four when Ronald Reagan became President. But I was a precocious Alex P. Keaton type and I quickly became an admirer. I remember the Reykjavik Summit. I remember the Evil Empire Speech. I remember the Tear Down This Wall Speech.
You know, Rush Limbaugh was going on this morning about his wonder that those of us under 30 could really mourn Reagan’s death. My answer is: children pick up very quickly on what frightens their parents. Kids are so scared of so much, that they notice right away when their parents are afraid of something. Any my parents were afraid—and rightly so—of the Soviet empire. I saw that, and I saw that here was a man they trusted to protect us from the Soviets. In the years that have passed, I have come to understand more thoroughly the nature of the threat the Soviet empire posed. But that it was a threat, and a serious one—I understood that as clearly then as I do now. And I remain naïve enough to be astonished by the absurd lengths to which the leftists in the media, the academy, and politics, try to obscure the truth about the Cold War. Just this morning, some idiot on ABC radio said (more or less): “Just as they say ‘only Nixon could go to China,’ only a cowboy like Ronald Reagan could get Americans to make peace with the Soviet Union.” What?! That sure as hell isn’t how I remember it happening.
In 1964, Mr. Reagan said “we are in a war that must be won.Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems….
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters….” There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.
Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement…. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then…? Nikita Khrushchev has told his people…that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ‘round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain….
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.”
He was right.
I understood, too, from an early age that it was wrong for government to take away the money a person earns through his own hard work. Children learn early on that it’s wrong to steal. It takes years of study before they can be brought to think that it’s okay to steal after all, because the bourgeois exploit the proletariat, blah blah…. In the years that have followed, I’ve learned more about how government economic regulation really is wrong. But that it is wrong—that I understood at an early age.
Ronald Reagan told the truth about the Soviet Union and about other tyrannies. He did the right thing at Reykjavik and at the Brandenburg Gate. He told the truth about domestic economic freedom. He did the right thing about taxes, and tried, I think, to do the right thing about spending. He was not afraid to speak up for a country and for ideals in which he believed, something I aspire always to have the courage to do. He was fundamentally honest. He was sincere. He was brave enough to say things that were considered inappropriate among the elites. He is an inspiration to me.
The world often fails to notice when a great man arrives. It always notices when a great man leaves.
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