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 neither 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 of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a few 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. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

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.

Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything.

We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments....

We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.

We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we can not have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....

Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.

If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. 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. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits-not animals." And he said, "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.

45 years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave this speech for Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater. The choices at the time were Goldwater or Johnson. Not since FDR, but now only before Obama had a President spent more of tax payer dollars for the "good" of those in "need." President Johnson, after signing the Great Society into law, stated that this was the completion to the work that FDR had started 3 decades earlier. Progressive, Constitution usurping policies during the time of FDR, carrying further by LBJ and now it 4th and goal, ball on the one yard line, 1 second left on the clock and BHO is undercenter. As was the case both times in the past, the need for a goal line stand has never been more important.

I would have loved to have taken credit for the eloquency of the words in the beginning of this post, but Reagan's stump speech and its relavence today, is an erry reminder that the liberal/progressive agenda doesn't change, it doesn't let up and it knows no limit to the amount of power it desires and the liberties it desires to strip from the American people. We are in the midst of an attempt to fundamentally transform the United States of America and institute world wide redistributive wealth transfers, ushering in socialism.

As Pastor Broden declared, "We must push back and push back and when we are tired of pushing back, we must push back some more." Let us not grow tired in well doing, knowing that in due season, we will reap a harvest. For our children and our children's children, let us remember the words of Reagan, 45 years ago, an envoke the spirit that founded our great country and changed the world into a place that gave mankind an opportunity to be free.

I am with you on the goal line stance.... We can hold them better yet PUSH THEM BACK!

Education is our key and the progressive movement took their time slowly and gradually nudging us. The scale is tipping and tipping fast..

Try to explain individualism vs collectivism because I get it all the time when you say those words and claim to be an individual - right back at you "you must not care for anyone else" Please people if you want to argue between these two extremes understand what it means to say you are one or the other....
THE CHASM: TWO ETHICS THAT DIVIDE THE WESTERN WORLD
There are many words commonly used today to describe political attitudes. We are
told that there are conservatives, liberals, libertarians, progressives, right-wingers, leftwingers,
socialists, communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Fascists, Nazis; and if that isn’t
confusing enough, now we have neo conservatives, neo Nazis, and neo everything else.
When we are asked what our political orientation is, we are expected to choose from one of
these words. If we don’t have a strong political opinion or if we’re afraid of making a bad
choice, then we play it safe and say we are moderates – adding yet one more word to the
list.
Social mores and religious beliefs sometimes divide along the Left-Right political
axis. In the United States, the Democrat Party is home for the Left, while the Republican
Party is home for the Right. Those on the Left are more likely to embrace life styles that
those on the Right would consider improper or even sinful. Those on the Right are more
likely to be church-going members of an organized religion. But these are not definitive
values, because there is a great deal of overlap. Republicans smoke pot. Democrats go to
church. Social or religious values cannot be included in any meaningful definition of these
groups.
Not one person in a thousand can clearly define the ideology that any of these words
represent. They are used, primarily, as labels to impart an aura of either goodness or
badness, depending on who uses the words and what emotions they trigger in their minds.
Most political debates sound like they originate at the tower of Babel. Everyone is speaking
a different language. The words may sound familiar, but speakers and listeners each have
their own private definitions.
It has been my experience that, once the definitions are commonly understood, most of the disagreements come to an end. To the amazement of those who thought they were
bitter ideological opponents, they often find they are actually in basic agreement. So, to deal
with this word, collectivism, our first order of business is to throw out the garbage. If we are
to make sense of the political agendas that dominate our planet today, we must not allow our
thinking to be contaminated by the emotional load of the old vocabulary
It may surprise you to learn that most of the great political debates of our time – at
least in the Western world – can be divided into just two viewpoints. All of the rest is fluff.
Typically, they focus on whether or not a particular action should be taken; but the real
conflict is not about the merits of the action; it is about the principles, the ethical code that
justifies or forbids that action. It is a contest between the ethics of collectivism on the one
hand and individualism on the other. Those are words that have meaning, and they describe
a philosophical chasm that divides the entire Western world.
The one thing that is common to both collectivists and individualists is that the vast
majority of them are well intentioned. They want the best life possible for their families, for
their countrymen, and for mankind. They want prosperity and justice for their fellow man.
Where they disagree is how to bring those things about.

*** more reading from G Edward Griffin author of "The Creatures from Jekyll Island"
http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pdf/futurecalling1.pdf