Читать книгу Freedom at Risk - James L Buckley - Страница 8

In Sum: A Political Credo

The following is taken from a statement I issued during my failed bid for re-election to the Senate in 1976. If I were issuing it today, I would modify it in only one respect. I would revise the second sentence to suggest that today’s ideologues are reluctant to allow Americans to make even the most trivial decisions affecting their lives.

For too many years, the ideologues in Washington have been in the driver’s seat. They don’t believe that free men and women can be trusted to govern themselves, and so they insist that the truly important decisions be moved as far away from the people as possible. These are the ideologues who for years have been imposing their goals, their priorities on the people of New York.

I believe that New Yorkers can be trusted to run their own affairs through the levels of government that are closest to them.

I believe that the free-enterprise system, operating in freedom and without the shackles of over-regulation from Washington, can do what it has done: create more jobs and prosperity and comfort and individual happiness than any other economic system in the world.

I believe that the controls we are most in need of in Washington are controls on the bureaucracy’s desire to control our lives.

I believe that we cannot afford one penny less for defense than the amount required to maintain our unquestioned ability to protect our legitimate interests wherever they are challenged.

I believe that our commitment to the proposition that all men are created equal is a commitment to the equal dignity and equal rights of each American as an individual, and not as a member of one sex or the other, or of one category or another.

I believe that the United States Constitution, with its principle of federalism designed to prevent a concentration of power in a central government and its Bill of Rights designed to protect the individual against the abuse of government power, remains the best protection of our freedoms.

I believe, finally, that in a free society, the role of government is to serve, not to rule.