We have come to a time of choosing

Excerpts from a 1964 speech by Ronald Reagan. bold typeface added.

"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 of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little 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.'

. . .

"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.

. . .

"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? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.

. . .

"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.

. . .

"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."

Sore Throat

Today's dilemma: how to distinguish between sore throat caused by CFS and a sore throat caused by an infection? I don't usually run fevers, and the other symptoms to watch for, like tender lymph nodes, can also result from CFS. So I think I'll phone the clinic and ask for a strept test, just to be sure.

Must-Read Articles on the Bailout

I still haven't figured out why final passage caused stocks to fall, but this WSJ article explains one of the bigger issues with the bill. "The most expensive long-term addition may turn out to be the increase in deposit insurance to $250,000 per account, from the current $100,000. ... The long-term danger is that this increase will merely encourage riskier lending behavior."

McCain is correct that Republicans have been warning of a Fannie and Freddie-related meltdown for years; read the quotes here and an article contemporary to the "deregulation" blamed by Barak Obama from The New York Times in 1999. (hat tip: Verna)

Was the problem too much deregulation? Mr. Clinton says, "No, ... it wasn't a complete deregulation at all... But I have really thought about this a lot. I don't see that signing that bill had anything to do with the current crisis. Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn't signed that bill."