By Senator Malcolm Wallop (ret.)

The vision of Ronald Reagan towers over the world as country by country on every continent it inches toward freedom grounded in liberty. We are, as we sit here, involved in a tough and painful war in a part of the world that has never known democracy yet risks lives and limbs to vote to establish it. We have heard too many say that Iraqis, never having known democracy cannot be expected to embrace it let alone deserve it.

This is an arrogance that only the most comfortable elites would dare to espouse. Leave them to suffer for we have no responsibility to help. How scary that most selfish thought is .

TONIGHT I COME TO SING THE PRAISES OF THE TRULY BLESSED COMPANY OF PEOPLE CALLED AMERICANS.
With all our faults and all the threats to our shrinking freedom we are worth the struggle to lay claim to our own fragile liberty.

Ronald Reagan knew that never before in history has any nation been so generous, so inventive, so selfless, so willing to shed its blood and treasure for others less fortunate in the world. Those at home who criticize us the most nonetheless choose to live here enjoying the privilege of a constitution’s guarantee that they can say what they wish without fear. One can even witness these American detesters celebrate with their allies in a media only too willing to find the faults they wish to proclaim.

Yet with all of that the American people stand proud. They live their lives, raise their children, worship in their chosen ways, support their communities and make a nation strong.

They do not live with hyphens to define them. And when, to our sorrow, they die in service to our country their markers do not read “here lies an Hispanic-American soldier, nor a Jewish-American soldier, nor an African-American soldier. It says here lies an American soldier.”

They are first and last Americans regardless of their color, their national heritage. Oh yes they resist when their government challenges their liberty, restricts their movement, and taxes their labor. Yet they go to work, and live with a serenity that only lives lived in freedom can provide.

Politically correct hyphens divide us unnecessarily. Indeed in the search for a mandated celebration of diversity we have, in the name of tolerance, become a sadly intolerant country.
It is wrong and can be seen as needlessly wrong.

Did we not see a spectacular example of that a couple of weeks ago when Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol? She lay in state not as an AFRICAN AMERICAN but as a true American heroine whose quiet dignity and courage expanded the freedom of each of us. She was recognized not for her race but for her defense of liberty. No hyphens here. Only her national stature, earned in front of us all, brought the thousands of Americans by to celebrate her life.

Rules had invaded her life and the lives of her people. Oddly the rules made no sense and had rarely been enforced, but, when they began to be, their inherent unfairness drew her dignified resistance. It began to illuminate the rest of the unfair encroachments invading the lives of certain Americans. Rosa Parks was strong enough to resist, and wise enough to prevail. She showed the country how and many citizens for different reasons have prevailed by their own similiar acts of resistance.

Even today the incessant rules our innumerable bureaucracies promulgate steal liberty from us. In the case of the hyphens they separate us. In the case of taxes they confound us. In the case labor they restrict us. In the case of prayer they seek to prohibit us. And so on and on.

deTOQUEVILLE saw it coming and described bureaucratic perversity as follows "It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

WHERE must we go and what must we do to avoid being herded? To begin with big government has largely deprived us of self-government. We get to vote for senators, congressmen, and presidents BUT NOT OUR JUDGES. We have less and less control over our lives because we have no control over the people who make the rules by which we live - about how we make and sell our products, about which groups get what preferences, about how we can use our land.

These are the millions of bureaucrats who work for the IRS, the EPA, the FCC, the EEOC, the BATF, the CPSC, OSHA, and innumerable other alphabet-soup agencies. They develop an arrogance of power that leads to the delusion that they are above the law. Take but one example in the Clinton administration. The Director of the Bureau of Land Management, Jim Baca, pronounced that if Congress refused to enact a restriction on livestock grazing on public lands, he would "be implementing it administratively."

Unlike the visionary governments of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, we march today ever closer to the administrative despotism of which deTOQUEVILLE warned as we remain the sheep, and the government happily remains our shepherd.

Time was when government in America meant mostly local government, but the federal judiciary, in the name of civil rights, has gone a long way toward making state and local governments into administrative subdivisions of the central government.

People cannot banish porn shops or vagrants from their towns, or even set the speed limits on their states' roads. Judges have taken over school systems and dictated zoning ordinances and tax increases. They even strike down referenda approved by voting citizens. The courts with the shameful consent of the Supreme Court even confiscate their property rights. Voting for local officials, then, is often meaningless because they are powerless, while voting for national officials is losing meaning because, with the connivance of the courts, they are all running a system that is too big to control.

Much corruption comes from the ignorant and greedy hope that the government's guarantees of security mean we will get more than we have paid for. Wrong. Among the most blatantly false guarantees is the oft stated claim that government-organized medical benefits, once granted, "can never be taken away." Of course they can! Throughout Europe, the government has long since taken "free" medical care away through ever increasing rationing , ever-rising user charges, and ever-lengthening waiting lines.

In Canada, you stand a greater chance of dying while waiting for a heart operation than you do of dying on the operating table. We should have learned our lesson from Social Security. The government now takes 15 percent of our income throughout our working lives in exchange for a promise that our benefits will "never be taken away." Then it spends the money not to the wage earner’s benefit but on his back to an unfulfillable promised indexing for present recipents.

At retirement it threatens to advance the required age, give us chicken feed, and then tax that. How much will we have to pay to learn that government cannot create wealth and that its attempts to guarantee benefits impoverish everyone?

The public educational system is also stripping us of civilization. Fifty years ago, the public schools were small and answered to parents.

Today should you live in California the 9th circuit says you have no rights even to determine by whom and how the sex education of your children is provided. Today schools are huge and answer to judges and to bureaucrats whose techniques coddle students' egos while emphasizing political correctness. And so called “grades," are inflated wildly, and have risen along with a contrived self-esteem but little learning. And now in some schools grades are not permitted at all being deemed invasions of self esteem. The real outcome?

Tests show almost half of adults to be functionally illiterate; they also show a drastic drop in the number of high achievers, stagnation or slow decline for the bulk of students, and disaster for those at the low end.

For most of our history, in cultural and social matters, government acted mostly by staying out of the way. When it did act, it acted in a way that fostered decency and responsibility. The laws protected marriage. Religion was honored throughout public life.

Today, by contrast, our U.S. government professes neutrality on questions of morality while actively undermining the prevailing moral standards. While it is not for government to prescribe morality, a government without a moral base fosters a citizenry without responsibility and a nation devoid of civility. It is no wonder that under our government's current mindset - prohibiting us from questioning any alternative lifestyle; or financing single women bearing children out of wedlock,

or proscribing all public reference to God; and still imposing tax penalties for married couples - individual responsibility is disappearing.

While government intrudes into so many facets of our lives where it has no business, it fails to meet its most basic responsibilities. Our fundamental freedom from physical harm is no longer protected. Families do not dare let children out of their sight, lest they be taken and robbed, beaten, or worse. Older people and all women long ago lost the ability to move freely about the cities at night.
Even by day, city streets are becoming gauntlets of bums who straddle the line between begging and mugging. The police? They will fine you for not wearing seat-belts, but when the hurricane came to New Orleans many in the police force, hesitant to act for fear of the violence, left the streets to looters and the helpless to fend for themselves.

"Taxes Are the Price We Pay for Civilization." So says an engraving on the IRS building in Washington.

On the contrary: today, taxes have become the price we pay to support people who deny our civilization. As government has grown, our civilization has declined. The Democratic Party wants government to grow even more, and leaders of the Republican Party have earned us the title of tax collectors for the welfare state.

People are building walls and gatehouses; around residential areas. Inside, the streets are private property governed by such rules as the owners choose to make.

The same goes for shopping malls, where there is, for example, no vagrancy, because the government's abolition of anti-vagrancy laws does not apply. This leads one to ask: Wouldn't it be nice if we Americans owned all the towns in which we live? Private schooling, like private policing, is gaining favor as families assume responsibility for the education of their children. Millions seek to cut taxes by taking part in the burgeoning "second economy." The IRS reports that "voluntary compliance" is down to 82 percent and dropping.

But wouldn't it be nice if we were not forced to become a nation of chiselers? Private secession from rotten big governments is familiar to many Europeans and all too familiar to those who lived under communism. But why not simply take back America's public space? We must again seek ways to Allow communities to set their own moral standards. To be sure the federal government cannot set moral standards, but it can step out of the way.

Prayer has been banished from schools, abortion imposed, criminals empowered and lewdness been made normal against the common sense of the country. Not even the most liberal politicians have dared do this through legislation. It has had to be done by the courts. The Supreme Court's claim to be the final arbiter of the propriety of everything that happens in this country is ridiculous. We should begin by clipping the Court's wings, as the Constitution explicitly allows.

If we do that, there won't be any need for federal laws defining lewd, obscene, or disruptive activities. People can do that all by themselves on the local level. The U.S. government must "pull back": not because of any agnosticism about what is decent, but because the American people, as a whole, are much more decent than their government. The dominant issue of our time is whether the state will continue to grow or be cut back.

I do not mean to suggest that the diminution of government will cure all of America's ills. I propose, however, that though not sufficient to their cure, the diminution of government is necessary Those who believe in principles now feel like outsiders.

FRONTIERS OF FREEDOM SUBSCRIBES TO WHAT WE BELIEVE IS THE AMERICAN IDEA.

Today it is fashionable among some Republicans 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 merely innocents 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?

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.

Our underlying problem is that the American liberal elites no longer have any faith in the American idea. As much of the world has thrown off communism and other forms of statism there is a lively debate among opinion leaders about whether any given country ought to follow the examples of Singapore, Chile, or Taiwan. Few, least of all U.S. officials, suggest that America is the model for the world. And yet, ordinary people from around the globe choose to immigrate to the United States of America over anyplace else.

To suggest that they come to get on welfare is an insult to them and to America, and it is simply false. This is the only country in the history of mankind where people of divergent nationalities can become, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood" of the Founders.

By following the Founding Fathers' beliefs in the equality of men before our Creator and in small government, America produced freedom, harmony, prosperity, and generosity.

No other set of ideas and practices has ever come close to doing as well. And yet since the 1930s America's elites have foisted upon us ideas and practices that would have revolted our Founders. Big government has been their tool. They have almost succeeded. If we are to restore the house of Washington and Lincoln, we are going to have to learn to reapply their model, the American model, to our reforms.

The great Ronald Reagan, to the dismay of the left, knew that the American model is based on the sober truth that government is not inherently the friend of ordinary people, and that it is invariably partial to the well-connected. Hence the American model calls for small government primarily for the sake of justice and honesty, and secondarily for the sake of efficiency.

What about the Republican Party? The Republicans, as reinvigorated by Ronald Reagan 25 years ago, seemed rededicated to freedom.

Let me quote his defining message for the Republicans. ``We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. . . . It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed . . . It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.

Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it . . .''

These words, spoken by Ronald Reagan in his first Inaugural address, are an embarrassing reminder of what Republicans could stand for. Could, but as often as not no longer do. Today, too many Republicans prefer to be Democrat Lite. As any beer connoisseur can tell you, Lite is a tasteless, repugnant concoction.

We find today that many Republicans, some who even claim to be conservatives, continue to promote big government. George Will has written about the corrupting effect of big government. But he disdains what he calls ``pillage and burn conservatism'', something he finds ``unlovely.'' His problem, the problem of too many Republicans, is that he assumes big, and perhaps bigger, government is here to stay and that the only question is who will rule it. They are wrong. Disdain for modern big government is wise, patriotic, and yes George, even lovely.

Conservatives have the right message for the American people. And today, more than at any time in recent years, we have a unique opportunity to find new ways of conveying that message, of reframing the debate.

Government was not meant to possess us, rule us, encompass us, judge for us, substitute for us. It was meant to serve us. We were founded as a noble self governing tribe of free peoples respecting each other as americans under God--not under Washington. Americans know this even if their government does not.

The biggest difference between the principle of government in America and anywhere else is that here the rulers must stick to clearly defined tasks, while ordinary people may do whatever they wish. We must make up our minds to put this principle into practice again, lest we lose the spirit that made us the envy of the world.

Most important, the American model is based on a certain kind of people-defined not by race but by virtue and by the willingness to take responsibility for our own lives.

People fit to be Americans ask for blessings only from God. Because being Americans is not a matter of birth, we must practice it every day-lest we become something else.

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 protect that splendid moral base.