The high office of the presidency requires not a continuous four-year campaign for re-election, but, rather, broad oversight and attention to three essential areas – the material, the moral, and the nation’s survival, in that ascending order of importance.
And in the last presidential election, you, the people, were gravely insulted. You were told that the material was not only the most important of these three but, in fact, really the only one that really mattered. I don’t hold to that for a moment. No one can deny the importance of material well being. And in this regard it is time to recognize that we have surrendered too much of our economic liberty.
I do not appreciate the value of economic liberty nearly as much for what it has done in keeping us fed as to what it’s done in keeping us free. The freedom of the marketplace is not merely the best guarantor of our prosperity, it is the chief guarantor of our rights. And a government that seizes control of the economy for the good of the people, ends up seizing control of the people for the good of the economy.
And our opponents portray the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s own time and labor as a kind of selfishness against which they must fight for the good of the nation. But they are deeply mistaken, for when they gather to themselves the authority to take the earnings and direct the activities of the people, they are fighting not for our sake, but for the power to tell us what to do.
– Bob Dole, Republican Presidential Candidate, US Senator
Yes, THAT Bob Dole – War hero (emphasis on HERO), long time Republican politician (moderate kind), Presidential candidate; the above is from his nomination speech (1996). Would be that he had been more strident on this message, and more forceful as a Senator in pushing the philosophy.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
