"A clear and compelling case for America's founding principles as an enduring source of real, practical guidance for today, explaining how we got so far off track and laying out how to get our nation back on course.” - William J. Bennett
“This book recovers the timeless truths on which our self-governing nation was founded and which made America the model of human freedom. These first principles are the indispensable guides policy makers need now.” - Paul Ryan
“With his trademark clarity and considerable eloquence, Spalding explains and extols our country's principles and tells us why the way forward depends on reclaiming them. We Still Hold These Truths is must reading for every American.” - Mitt Romney
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Democrats called it a historic opportunity. Republicans called it a sham.
Long-awaited debate over President Barack Obama's health care overhaul kicked off in the Senate with lawmakers trading bitter partisan words over the measure to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
The legislative struggle is expected to last for weeks in a test that pits GOP senators determined not to give ground against Senate Democrats determined to deliver on Obama's signature issue.
[Editor: The following text is known simply as "The Speech". It was a standard oratory delivered by Ronald Reagan when he was stumping for Barry Goldwater in 1964. It is a classic treatise on the principles of conservatism.]
I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.
It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."
This idea -- that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power -- is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream--the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.
The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.
Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.
Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.
Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends?
Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients.
If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.
They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Roadmap to Victory
Reagan 101
Government isn't the solution to our problems; government is the problem.
Jefferson on the National Debt
I sincerely believe that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling future generations on a large scale.
The earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge the second with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.
Neither the representatives of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled, can validly engage debts beyond what they may pay in their own time.
The natural right to be free of the debts of a previous generation is a salutary curb on indebtment, which, since the modern theory of the perpetuation of debt, has crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.
We, as Americans, shall consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves.
If the nation runs into such debts that our rulers must tax what we eat and drink, our comforts and amusements–even our necessities–then we are as a people with rivets chained around our necks.
To preserve the independence of the people, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
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