Ronald Reagan: Governance (page 2)

“Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time."”

Ronald Reagan

Time (17 May 1976); Reagan adviser Jude Wanniski has indicated http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/10-05-99.html that, in 1933, New Dealers as well as much of the world admired Mussolini’s success in avoiding the Great Depression
1970s

Time , Success , Training

“The doctor begins to lose freedom.... First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go.... All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.”

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine (1961 LP)
1960s

School , Freedom , Waiting

“When the commander in chief of a nation finds it necessary to order employees of the government or agencies of the government to do things that would technically break the law, he has to be able to declare it legal in order for them to do that.”

Ronald Reagan

Response to the Frost-Nixon interviews on the Watergate scandal, UPI (21 May 1977)
1970s

Law

“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”

Ronald Reagan

[Conservatives betrayed: how George W. Bush and other big government republicans hijacked the Conservative cause, Viguerie, Richard A., Bonus Books, 978-1-56625-285-0, 43]
Attributed

People , Problem

“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to ensure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path.”

Ronald Reagan

Interview published in Reason (1 July 1975)
1970s

Travel , Soul , Thinking , Sense

“"We the people" tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. "We the people" are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which "We the people" tell the government what it is allowed to do. "We the people" are free.”

Ronald Reagan

1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989), Farewell Address (1989)

People , World , Cars

“You can't be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy.”

Ronald Reagan

Campaign rally for V.P. George H.W. Bush, San Diego California (7 November 1988), as quoted in Common Sense of an Uncommon Man https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1400324203, Thomas Nelson Inc. (2014), Jim Denney & Michael Reagan, 'Bureaucracy and Bureaucrats'
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)

Guy

“Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy."”

Ronald Reagan

In a 1960 letter to the GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon, quoted in Matthew Dallek's The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (2000), p. 38
1960s

Age , Way , Imagination , Idea

“One legislator accused me of having a nineteenth-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an eighteenth-century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government's primary concerns.”

Ronald Reagan

Address to the Republican State Central Committee Convention (7 September 1973)
1970s

Law , Falseness

“And I have to point out that government doesn't tax to get the money it needs, government always needs the money it gets.”

Ronald Reagan

Bush-Reagan Debate 1980 on Taxes at League of Women Voters. (24 April 1980) · video footage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edchtf9MS7g
1980s

Money

“There are those in America today who have come to depend absolutely on government for their security. And when government fails they seek to rectify that failure in the form of granting government more power. So, as government has failed to control crime and violence with the means given it by the Constitution, they seek to give it more power at the expense of the Constitution. But in doing so, in their willingness to give up their arms in the name of safety, they are really giving up their protection from what has always been the chief source of despotism — government. Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the government the more corrupt it will become. And if we give it the power to confiscate our arms we also give up the ultimate means to combat that corrupt power. In doing so we can only assure that we will eventually be totally subject to it. When dictators come to power, the first thing they do is take away the people's weapons. It makes it so much easier for the secret police to operate, it makes it so much easier to force the will of the ruler upon the ruled.”

Ronald Reagan

Column published in Guns and Ammo (1 September 1975)
1970s

People , Secret , Failure , Dependency

“History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”

Ronald Reagan

Address to the nation from the White House http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.htm (16 January 1984)
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

War , History

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Ronald Reagan

Attributed to Reagan from informal remarks to reporters 10 October 1984,and to students and faculty at St. John's University 28 March 1985.[citation needed] The statement was made a decade earlier by Gerald Ford in an address to a Joint Session of the Congress, 12 August 1974. It is sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Barry Goldwater.
Similar assertions have often been attributed to Barry Goldwater. Some of the inspiration for such expressions may lie in "The Criminality of the State" by Albert Jay Nock in American Mercury (March 1939) where he stated: "You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."
Misattributed
Variant: A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.

“I’ve been frustrated and angered by the attempts to paint me as a racist and as lacking in compassion for the poor. On the one subject I was raised by a mother and father who instilled in me and my brother a hatred for bigotry and prejudice, long before there was such a thing as a civil rights movement. As for the poor, we were poor in an era when there were no government programs to turn to. I’m well aware of how lucky I’ve been since and how good the Lord has been to me.”

Ronald Reagan

As quoted in "Ronald Reagan and Race" https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ronald-reagan-and-race-richard-nixon-tape/ (August 2019), by Jay Nordlinger, National Review
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

Anger , Painting

“I realize there is a great lack of information about what I did as governor of California and it increases the farther east you go. As a result of this, I know that the minority community has an impression that I have little or no interest in their problems. When I became governor I discovered that after eight years of liberal Democratic rule in Sacramento, very little outside of rhetoric had been done for the minorities. The civil service regulations were such that it was virtually impossible for a black employee of state government to rise above the very lowest job levels. We got those rules changed.”

Ronald Reagan

As quoted in "Ronald Reagan and Race" https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ronald-reagan-and-race-richard-nixon-tape/ (August 2019), by Jay Nordlinger, National Review
1970s

Problem , Change , Communication

“The demography of happiness, in this study the government found out that young people are happier than old people, and they found out that people that earn more are happier than people that earn less, and they found out that well people are happier than sick people… It took $249,000 to find out that it’s better to be rich, young and healthy than old, poor and sick.”

Ronald Reagan

On US government spending. Interview on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on 01/03/1975 as shown on YouTube The Tonight Show video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNmnmdtcdcg
1970s

Happiness , People , Study

“Those mujahideen are freedom fighters. Those are people fighting for their own country and not wanting to become a satellite state of the Soviet Union, which came in and established a government of its choosing there, without regard to the feelings of the Afghans.”

Ronald Reagan

As quoted in REAGAN HINTING AT ARMS FOR AFGHAN REBELS https://web.archive.org/web/20150524080811/https://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/10/world/reagan-hinting-at-arms-for-afghan-rebels.html (10 March 1981)
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

Freedom , People , Country , Fight