[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 149 (Thursday, December 1, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: December 1, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             FINAL ADDRESS

  Mr. WALLOP. Mr. President, 18 years ago, and again 12, and again 6 
years ago, the people of Wyoming sent me to Washington to reaffirm 
their vision of America--to protect the America they know and love 
against all enemies foreign and domestic. In each of my campaigns, I 
made no bones about who those enemies were, and what we should do about 
them. Today, as I choose to end my years in the Senate, I am delighted 
that our main foreign enemies have collapsed, happy to have been among 
the staunchest opponents of communism and the Soviet Union, and 
thrilled to have played a major part in leaving our country a splendid 
new weapon against new enemies who might arise. But I regret that the 
domestic enemies against whom I campaigned--big government and the 
culture of statism--are a greater threat than ever to the American way 
of life. The only encouraging sign on this front is that illusions 
about the benevolence of government have well-nigh vanished among 
ordinary Americans. Perhaps politicians will get the message.
  Far be it from me to claim credit on behalf of conservatives for the 
fall of communism. I thank God alone for the fact that the bloody 
hammer and sickle was hauled down the Kremlin's flagpole on Christmas 
Day 1991. And I recognize that the Communist system, corrupt in every 
way, would still be aiming missiles at us except for the total, comical 
incompetence of Mikhail Gorbachev. It is both presumptuous and futile 
to speculate what effect, if any, foreigners had on the minds of the 
Soviet officials who made decisions that inadvertently destroyed the 
Soviet Union. Their intramural discussions at the time contained 
nothing either about the hardness or the softness of American policy. 
Nor for that matter are they about economics. The evidence points to 
Gorbachev, his friends, and his antagonists being motivated by the 
pettiest politics. Moreover, living in the house that Stalin built, 
they had lost the will to rule by mass murder, as Stalin had.
  But we can be precisely certain of what Americans were trying to do 
with regard to the Soviet Union. There can be no doubt about some of 
us. I told anyone who would listen, every chance I got, that the Soviet 
Union and its empire were our mortal enemy, that we ought to do 
everything in our power to throw it on the scrap heap of history, and 
that we ought to prepare to fight, survive, and win a war against it. 
President Reagan felt this passion but there is little doubt how 
ridiculed this point of view was in high places. Just look up the 
countless declarations of the Secretaries of State about how brilliant 
Gorbachev was, and how dedicated we should be to a United States-Soviet 
partnership. Or look up theirs and the prestige press' disdain for the 
view that communism was something to be destroyed, not compromised 
with. These same sophisticates opposed providing the key weapons to the 
Afghans who defeated the Soviet invasion of their country. As chairman 
of the Budget Subcommittee of the Intelligence Committee, I doubled the 
budget for our Afghan operations every time it came before me, and put 
in provisions for Stinger missiles. I also fought these same officials 
to put weapons into the hands of the Nicaraguan Contras who defeated a 
Soviet-Cuban takeover of their country that could have put Mexico onto 
a path far worse than the excellent one that it is now treading. When 
these officials, never mind liberal Senators, put their faith in arms 
control and in the Soviet Union's observance of treaties, I preferred 
to trust in American defensive weapons. The Soviet Foreign Minister 
acknowledged that the American officials and Senators felt no 
inclination to apologize to those whom they had maligned for being 
right. But that was not surprising. A press that had joined them in 
maligning us was not about to insist upon contrition.
  Most of all I am proud of the role I played between 1978 and 1983 in 
starting many of the Defense Department programs that would later be 
labeled SDI. Let me emphasize the difference: The programs I helped to 
start did not aim at research. Nor did they aim at abstract, grand 
schemes: They aimed to produce actual, individual weapons and sensors 
to kill missiles that could kill Americans. Then President Reagan put 
the SDI Program into the hands of people who, sad to say, wanted to use 
it for every imaginable purpose--except to build real weapons. And so, 
in the name of SDI, hucksters spent billions of dollars for never-never 
projects, while arms controllers handicapped real weapons programs 
diluting, delaying, and usually dooming them.
  But, I am happy to say, one anti-missile program managed to survive 
SDI better than might have been expected. This is the chemical-power 
space based laser, the very weapon that first raised interest in 
serious missile defense 15 years ago. No program was so maligned as 
this. Everybody from Edward Teller to Sidney Drell said this laser 
weapon couldn't be built, and--paradoxically--said it would be 
dangerous to try to build it. None was so politically incorrect. But in 
a nutshell, by adhering to the guidelines I laid out for it 15 years 
ago, this program has produced all the pieces of a weapon that could 
destroy any missile ever built or designed within 2 seconds, at 
distances greater than 3,000 miles. If this country and this Congress 
want protection against the missiles that Saddam Husseim, Kim Jong-Il, 
or anybody else might send against us or our allies, they have only to 
say so, and this defensive weapon can be put together. It is there. 
Now.

  Sure, the arms controllers in the U.S. Government made certain that 
no program would produce any component of a weapon. But the good guys 
can play with definitions as well as the bad guys--and sometimes the 
good guys win. The Space-Based Laser Program was broken up into any 
number of pieces. But the people running the pieces remembered: Don't 
build laboratory devices. Build only things that can be mass-produced. 
If you must scale down a piece of equipment, do it by using a fraction 
of other parts you would use in the real McCoy. Thus the laser you can 
see at the TRW facility at San Juan Capistrano, CA develops about 2 
megawatts of power. But it has only one-third of the pieces that an 8-
megawatt missile killing device would have. And what is there is laid 
out in a frame designed from the outset to accept the remainder of 
other pieces. So it is with the rest of the weapon.
  The credit goes to the marvelous American engineers who did it. I 
hope that the incoming Congress takes the opportunity to spend some of 
the money that the American people mistakenly believe is spent on our 
mutual protection to buy this device, which could save millions of 
American lives. If this happens, I will be glad I had something to do 
with making it possible.
  But why continue to worry about foreign enemies now that communism is 
gone? In short, because as Charles de Gaulle used to say, ``The future 
lasts a long time.'' During the past half century we have been involved 
in only two major wars, and the parts of the world that are most 
important to us have been relatively peaceful because the United States 
of America has been militarily strong. But in recent years, under 
Presidents of both parties, we have been living under the assumption 
that history has ended. Nothing could be further from the truth. No 
assumption could be more dangerous. American military power--and 
nothing but American military power--has kept a Pax Americana over 
Europe and the Northern Pacific Rim. Now that American power is 
withdrawing, we see NATO humiliated on its doorstep, and Japan and 
South Korea cowering before North Korea's budding nuclear arsenal. We 
risk losing the world that our grandfathers won for us in World War II, 
and we risk the birth of a world disorder that may require a lot more 
from our children than the post-war world has required of us.
  Our country needs better defense policy. Reversing the shrinkage and 
de-nuclearization of our Armed Forces, as well as providing a serious 
anti-missile defense, would be good places to begin. More important, we 
need a more serious national discussion of foreign and defense policy. 
I am leaving the Senate, but will take part in that discussion.
  The people of Wyoming first sent me to Washington in 1976 in part 
because I articulated their frustration with Federal occupational 
safety and health regulations. Who could be against health and safety 
on the job? Who could be against clean air and water? Certainly not the 
good people of Wyoming. Certainly not me. Our beef--if you will pardon 
the expression--is with a government that uses these and other lofty 
purposes as a means of exercising arbitrary bureaucratic power. 
Government at all levels taxes, spends, and regulates roughly twice as 
much as when I grew up. It touches every aspect of our lives, and harms 
just about everything it touches. It will fine you for not wearing a 
seatbelt, but will not protect your life from criminals. It will 
deliver contraceptives to your children, but cannot deliver the mail. 
It prohibits a Jewish community in New York from having a school 
district--who knows what politically incorrect things their kids might 
learn from reading the bible--and it forces the culture of abortion on 
the whole country. In the name of racial equality, the Government 
forces us to discriminate on the basis of race. Once upon a time, our 
Government was a bulwark against domestic enemies. Now big Government 
has become our chief domestic enemy.
  In 1980 the American people voted for the Republic Party, hoping that 
the Republicans would shrink the Government and make it switch sides in 
the great cultural conflict that is raging among us. But the 
Republicans put on their tuxes and spent their time trying to make the 
system work. And so taxes rose, regulations multiplied, officials 
became more arrogant, courts took over more of other people's powers, 
and society continued to become less recognizably American. In 1992 the 
American people threw out a Republican President who, obviously was on 
the side of the Government rather than of the people. Now the 
electorate has put its hopes in a Republican Congress, but the American 
people have made clear that they do not trust Republicans very far. 
Almost three out of five Americans say they would like to see a new 
political party--and most of those who say so usually vote Republican. 
To me, this means that the Republican Party has one more chance to be 
on the side of the America's people and against their Government. If it 
muffs this chance, it will be abandoned--deservedly so. The electorate 
asked republican politicians to do something very unnatural to any 
politician--yield back power. Restore the people's dominion over turf 
you have now occupied from democratic plantation managers.

  What should the Republican Party do? Nothing less than to pursue a 
vision of America radically opposed to that of contemporary 
sophisticates--the America our Founding Fathers established, our 
fathers fought for, and the America we grew up in. Our Founders--
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln--set this country on the path to 
greatness by making sure that our Government would be small and frugal, 
that it would be on the side of the virtues necessary to preserve the 
system. Lincoln, for example, argued that accepting slavery as an 
alternative source of labor would undermine respect for all labor, and 
that it would foster the habit of living off one another. Lincoln 
taught that fear of God, respect for human life, freedom and property, 
would allow generations of Americans who had no blood ties to the 
Founders to become ``flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood'' with 
them. The Government established by the Founders did not make us moral. 
But it took pains to be on the right side of the great moral questions.
  This country was peaceful and secure not because the streets were 
patrolled by Government agents, but because citizens enforced high 
standards of civil behavior, because citizens were armed and protected 
their own property, and because local police were highly responsive to 
the demands of local citizens. The police knew the difference between 
the decent citizens whom they served, and the deviants against whom 
they worked.
  This country was wealthy not because of its natural resources--the 
Indians had lived in violent semi-starvation--or because Government 
gave us this or that, nor because Government forced wages up nor 
because it granted privileges to favorite companies. Americans created 
more wealth than the world had ever known because Government in America 
taxed less, regulated less, and gave fewer privileges than any other 
government in history.
  This country became a world power not because there are so many of 
us--the Chinese are six times as numerous--or because we are so rich--
the European Union has a bigger economy--or because we have so many 
weapons--Russia has more. Our numbers, our wealth, and our weapons 
became military power because the American people are more patriotic, 
and more apt to think that we have a duty to do what is right and 
reasonable than any other people in the world. And we became powerful 
because until recently our leaders honored the American people's 
religion and manliness, and because they themselves served in the Armed 
Forces.
  With each passing year, however, our America resembles less and less 
what the Founders left us and looks more and more like the countries 
our immigrant forefathers tried to get away from. This is happening in 
large part because the people who are running this country want it to 
happen and have used the enormous powers of the U.S. Government to make 
it happen.
  But Why? It is all too plain that the people who are running this 
country deeply dislike the America of the Founders. If the people who 
run our Government, our universities, our media, the entertainment 
industry, the arts, and the so forth had their way, you and I would be 
placed in re-education camps--financed by us, of course--to learn new 
ways.
  What do the elites of this country have against us? They think our 
patriotism is unsophisticated at best, and chauvinistic at worst. They 
thought our opposition to communism was dangerous and anti-progressive. 
The current generation of American leaders thought that we were on the 
wrong side in the Vietnam war. Two-thirds of our Congressmen have never 
served in the Armed Fores. Military service is the rare exception in 
the families of those who have the most to say about putting Americans 
in harm's way. Many in power say that America is nothing special, and 
that our troops ought to do the bidding of the United Nations. 
Moreover, our patriotism exalts qualities that they abhor: manliness, 
righteousness, the capacity to use force.
  Often as not American political elites dislike the American people's 
prosperity. It is the stated policy of the U.S. Government that the 
American people consume too much of the world's energy and natural 
resources, that our appetite for automobiles, for meat and comfortable 
houses, is a drag on the planet and contributes to poverty in the Third 
World. So, those who run this country want to tax us to support the 
United Nations, and they want us to make cars and industry more 
expensive. They think that America suffers from public poverty amidst 
private luxury, so they want to tax more and to regulate more, to shift 
power and wealth to people like themselves. Whether the excuse is 
environmentalism, or poverty, or crime, the recipe is always the same: 
Take money away from independent working Americans and give it to the 
favorites of the governing class. It transfers only power--not 
solutions, only dependency, not liberty.
  Of course, this is a recipe for economic decline. I would remind the 
Senate that nowhere in the writings of the Founding Fathers is there 
anything about managing the economy. Our Founders wanted to promote 
prosperity. So they set about ensuring that Government would be small, 
frugal, impartial, and moral. We became a wealth country because 
Government, in Jefferson's words, would not ``take from the mouth of 
labor the bread it had earned.'' If we abandon the Founders' mores, no 
economic policy can keep us out of the poorhouse.
  Our leaders dislike our tradition of self-government. They equate 
local control of crime with brutality and racism. Local zoning is 
racism. Local control of schools is racist. We are all racists--except 
they. The have turned laws that prohibit racial discrimination into 
mandates for racial preferences in everything from school admissions to 
congressional districting, to hiring and firing and promotions, and 
contracting, and insurance, and lending. A whole industry has grown up 
to administer this American form of apartheid. If you want your town or 
business to stay out of trouble nowadays, you need highly paid and 
well-connected human relations specialists. Within the U.S. Government, 
in schools and businesses, there are mandatory counseling sessions--not 
unlike under communism.
  Of course this sows racial hatred amongst us. It emboldens young 
blacks to demand menacingly, and creates new classes of victims among 
young whites, Hispanics, Asians and politically unconnected people in 
general. But in the end, this has nothing to do with race, and 
everything to do with leftist politics. The people who run these 
programs are white men, who are not about to give up their own 
privileges to anybody. In the name of racial justice, and at the price 
of racial harmony, they are increasing their own power to privilege 
their friends at the expense of everyone else, and to diminish 
competition for themselves.
  The people who run this country don't care about public safety, 
having made it very difficult for States and localities to police 
themselves, having left ordinary citizens with no choice but to protect 
themselves as best they can. They are now trying to take our guns away. 
In fact they blame us and our guns for crime. This is so wrong that it 
cannot be an honest mistake. The don't want safety for us. The want to 
strike at our culture.
  The people who run this country don't care that our children are 
being diseducated or that schools are becoming factories of ignorance 
and decay. Every proposal regarding education that has come out of the 
establishment has called for more money. Over the past 30 years we have 
tripled the amount of money that we pay to the public schools per 
pupil, in real terms. And guess what? Not only has educational 
performance dropped everywhere, but it dropped worst where we spent 
most. The places where kids are not being hurt too badly, where test 
scores are highest, are out in the sticks--in places like Utah, Iowa, 
and Wyoming, where the establishment has not yet been able fully to 
implement its model of big, bureaucratically controlled districts that 
give out condoms, banish prayer, teach self-esteem, and bash all 
American history prior to the 1960's, maybe we hicks aren't so stupid 
after all. But the establishment continues to want money, tries to grab 
more control, and keeps looking down on us.
  Above all, the people who run this country have deep contempt and 
enmity for the culture on which it rests. What must be the moral 
priorities of those who run the Democratic National Committee, who 
declared that the Christian pro-family movement is the most serious 
threat to America today? What vision of America must be in their minds 
that they are frightened by the prospect of more moms, dads, and 
children going to church? Clearly their's is a vision very different 
from George Washington's and Abe Lincoln's. And are Republican leaders 
so different? The tell us we are zealots if we talk about social issues 
and about the role of religion in public life. I say, what else is 
worth talking about? They say: concentrate on the economy. But 
prosperity comes from the morality and sense of responsibility of the 
population, as well as from small government. It comes from the 
culture, not from recipes dreamed up in Government offices or think 
tanks.
  So how do we safeguard, how do we promote the culture that made us 
prosperous? Do we do it by celebrating people who terminate their 
responsibility to the child they have conceived by killing him or her 
and at the same time use Medicaid to provide fertility medicines? Do we 
say, as Stephen Douglas said about slavery, that we ``don't care'' one 
way or the other? I think Lincoln would warn us against expecting that 
any sort of prosperity, never mind decency, could be built on such 
views of responsibility and human life. Again, can education turn out 
competent workers, never mind decent citizens, if it continues to 
stress condoms over continence and relativism over religion? And again, 
are we going to be healthy economically--never mind in other ways--if 
our establishment keeps on talking and spending as if alternative 
families and alternative lifestyles were on the same moral plane as 
mom, dad and the kids? Not a chance.

  The sum of all this is that our Government is run by people who are 
using the powers vested in them by the Constitution, and the powers 
that come from spending $1.5 trillion per year of our money to undo 
what remains of the culture, the habits, the freedoms that made this 
country unique. There is a struggle about what kind of country we will 
be. Government and its allies in the media, education, and big business 
are on the wrong side.
  It is all too easy to list the ways in which the U.S. Government is 
providing incentives to break up families, to put generations and races 
at war with one another, to devalue honest work, to dumb-down and 
coarsen children, for bureaucrats to seek their own interest, for 
businesses to court regulators, to seek protection, and the public be 
damned. It is also easy enough, as well as satisfying, to discuss 
remedies for all these phenomena.
  We can and should end welfare--not ``as we know it.'' Just end it, 
period. Charity for those who deserve it is something with a long and 
honorable history. But the short history of welfare tells us that as a 
Federal program it does no good, only harm.
  We can and should eliminate Social Security. Just as certainly people 
who are already retired or about to retire should get every penny 
already promised. But just imagine if every penny deducted from us 
henceforth went into individual retirement accounts. We could all look 
forward to a lot more money, and the Government would have a lot less 
to spend from day to day.
  For the monsters of Medicare and Medicaid we can and should 
substitute individual medical savings accounts, backed up by vouchers.
  We can be rid of the ponderous educational establishment by giving 
parents vouchers for whatever amount any level of government taxes them 
to educate their children.
  We can be rid of the most noxious parts of the university world by 
cutting all direct aid to higher education and substituting tuition 
scholarships to individual students which they must repay. Where this 
scheme has been tried, students deserted rotten professors in droves.
  We can stop our tax system's pressure against families by increasing 
deductions for children. Perhaps those moms who want to will be able to 
raise their own children again.
  We can be rid of the terrible bureaucracy of the IRS, and of all the 
distortive inequities of the system just by instituting a flat tax.
  We can restore self-government by reducing the power of the Federal 
courts to review the acts of State courts and the enactments of State 
legislatures.
  The objective of these and many other provisions would be to shrink 
Government and to stop it from doing further harm.
  The good news is that all these things are double. Sure, the American 
people are sick enough of big government and have learned to distrust 
the establishment so much that a reform program of this kind stands a 
chance. The bad news is that no set of legislation or even 
constitutional amendments is going to sweep away the entrenched 
interests and bad habits built up over a generation. Our moral fiber 
has been damaged. We are no longer quite the virtuous people for whom 
the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, the people who fought at 
Gettysburg and at Omaha Beach. That is why to set us back on the 
Founders' path we need moral leadership. By this I mean that we must 
understand every change we make above all as a means of restoring the 
character that made Americans unique.
  We want to cut taxes not primarily because doing so will put more 
money in our pockets, but principally because it will put the means of 
freedom in our hands. We want to cut the Government's power to grant 
privilege not primarily because privilege is economically inefficient, 
but because we don't want to be a nation of favor-seekers. We want to 
keep and bear our guns not because we want to shoot somebody, but 
because we have an irreducible right to take care of ourselves. Moral 
leadership, today as in 1789, does not mean that the President of the 
United States forces anyone to go to church or synagogue. But it does 
mean that by word and deed he leads the country in giving unto God the 
things that are God's. Today according to the current Supreme Court, 
Abraham Lincoln's proclamation of Thanksgiving Day would be 
unconstitutional. I say that Lincoln knew better, and that recent 
Supreme Court decisions on religion are unconstitutional.

  It is impossible to lay out all the instances in which political 
leaders can exercise moral leadership precisely because every act of 
Government influences our habits in some way. Let us not forget that 
the Greek philosophers taught that we are the sum of our habits, and 
that the Greek word for habits is ``Ethics.'' If we want to live like 
Americans, we had better shun the ethics of the people who are tearing 
down this country, and strive for the ethics of those who built it.
  Let me conclude by noting that I have not mentioned the name 
``Clinton,'' and that I mentioned both the Republican and Democratic 
Parties as part of the problem. America faces a choice between two 
radically opposed views of itself and of the good life. On one side is 
the view you and I grew up with, the view of the Founders, the way of 
life of most families in this country. On the other is the view you can 
read in the pages of Time magazine, the New York Times, and the 
Prestige Press. This is the view that animates the U.S. Government. The 
great question of our time is whether Government will continue to work 
against the original American way of life, or will switch and support 
it as it once did. The only possible way of enabling Government to make 
this switch, I think, is to cut it down to a small fraction of its 
current size. Now, this is an issue that transcends parties. It is an 
issue that, most likely, will cause a realignment of Parties, or even 
the death of one or both of our current parties and the birth of a new 
one. The more secular we have become the more we pray to Government for 
that which we once prayed to God. Nothing happens anymore. Everything 
is caused and is therefore to someone's credit or blame. This is 
nonsense and is unsustainable policy. Decency yields no more credit 
than indecency. How can we sustain families on this notion?
  All of that is not so important. The only important thing is that the 
American people and the American way of life be defended against their 
enemies, and that they be defended worthily.
  In all my public life, nothing has cheered and sustained me as much 
as the constantly recurring evidence of the good sense and virtue of 
the American people. And nothing has angered and dispirited me more 
than politicians' and other so called elites' disdain for the average 
American.
  I recall that during the first half of the Vietnam war, the wise men 
of foreign policy, from McGeorge Bundy to George Ball, were belittling 
the American people's demand, echoed by Barry Goldwater, that we win 
the war or get out. No, they said. This insistence on victory is 
simplistic, unsophisticated, outdated, and lacking in maturity. In our 
modern age, victory is impossible but involvement is inevitable. 
Knowledgeable professionals, namely themselves, were going to adjust 
the conflict to a mutually acceptable solution, if only the children of 
lesser Americans--not their own--would continue to get themselves shot. 
Then in the second half of the war, as well as after the war, these 
same people told us that our militarism had pushed us in, that we had 
gotten the lesson we deserved, but that now we, the American people, 
had become incapable of supporting a meaningful foreign policy, namely 
one led by them. This was Henry Kissinger's constant theme in the 
1970's. Remember the tones of Spenglerian gloom with which he justified 
renouncing the United States' right to protect itself against ballistic 
missiles? The weakness of the American people made him do it. By the 
same token, during the 1980s, from Strobe Talbott in Time magazine as 
well as from Harvard and Stanford, we heard how dangerously stupid the 
American people were to harken to Ronald Reagan's call to defend this 
country and to relegate the Soviet Union to the dustbin of history. The 
elites knew better--or thought they did. Now the same people decry as 
neo-isolationism the elites' call to send the children of average 
Americans--surely not their own--to so-called peace-keeping and nation-
building missions. Meanwhile they strip this country's military while 
their bungling diplomacy stores up future troubles. And they wonder why 
the American people think foreign policy is a mess?
  Well, the American people lack neither wisdom nor the capacity for 
generous sacrifice. The same year the people of Wyoming sent me to 
Washington, the country also elected Jimmy Carter. Carter had 
campaigned for ``A government as good as its people.'' He had seemed to 
reject the establishment's prescriptions for America's managed decline, 
most eloquently expressed by Henry Kissinger. Sadly, he brought in a 
wing of the establishment that was even further out of sympathy with 
America. Almost the same can be said of the American people's choice of 
Bill Clinton my point is this: the American people always vote for the 
Presidential candidate who seems to embody the old American virtues, 
the traditional, common sense view of America in the world. More often 
than not, alas, politicians have not been worthy of the people's trust. 
They have drawn on the well of the American people's generous 
patriotism, but have done nothing to refill it. Thank God that well is 
deep.

  Today it is fashionable among Republican as well as Democratic elites 
to ascribe the ills of big government to the American people's 
supposedly insatiable appetite for government checks and privileges, 
combined with their miserly unwillingness to pay for them. According to 
what one can hear from practically every talking head in the mainstream 
media, pork and corruption are demand-side problems. The politicians 
and their bureaucratic allies are innocent, just following orders.
  This is nonsense. The social programs that have done so much harm to 
this country have been sold to the American people with false 
pretenses. Sometimes the very names of the programs are Orwellian 
reversals of reality--none more so than ``aid to families with 
dependent children.'' Who would have voted for Social Security if it 
had been presented as what it is, a chain letter, a ponzi scheme, that 
spends the workers money the moment it comes in, and that cannot return 
it unless each generation is taxed more heavily than the previous one? 
Who would have voted for Medicare if it had been made clear that this 
would bureaucratize and render much more expensive all health care in 
America? And who the heck voted for the Supreme Court decisions that 
ended America's tradition of local self-government, and made 
pornography, abortion, and vagrancy into basic rights while pushing 
religion out of public life? Who ever voted to institute a system of 
racial classification in this country? Certainly not the American 
people. All of these things are anathema to the average American.
  But now comes the crucial questions: How long can any people, no 
matter how virtuous, remain uncorrupted when governed by laws and 
elites that tend to corrupt? This week's New York Times carries an 
account of widespread tax evasion in Germany. In Germany? That most 
order-loving of countries? Buy why? Simply because it seems that tax 
burden has grown so great that the people think it unreasonable. There 
is no doubt that our own laws and administration, fiscal and otherwise, 
have become so burdensome and unreasonable that our own tradition of 
law-abiding is fading.
  There is no doubt that entitlements and privileges corrupt those who 
give and those who receive them, whether they are rich or poor. This 
list of threats to the American people's virtue is long. No one can say 
how long the character and habits bequeathed to us by the Founding 
Fathers will last and whether they will vanquish the threats or be 
overcome by them.
  The size our continent, its fabulous wealth, its indescribable 
beauty, the ships, tanks, and airplanes in our arsenal, are no treasure 
compared to the moral character of the American people. I pray to God 
that he will graciously help us preserve and improve it.

                          ____________________