76-05-B8
- Main Page \ Reagan Radio Commentaries \ 1976
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Britain[edit]
Transcript[edit]There'll always be an England and England shall be free. We sang those words a long time ago in World War II. I hope they're still true. I'll be right back. Many commentators and pundits have called attention to the fact that the United States seems to follow a course set by the British. Many put us about 15 years behind our English cousins in adopting social reforms pioneered by them. Well of late that's been a cause for alarm. Under the leadership of the socialist Labour Party, Britain has slid into seemingly unsolvable economic problems. Inflation and unemployment are staggering and the value of the pound is sinking like a modern day Titanic. Per man-hour productivity in her industrial structure has gone down until the once vaunted English craftsman is way behind his counterparts in all of the common market countries. Still egged on by irresponsible labor leaders, he asks for shorter hours, higher pay and more perks--that's fringe benefits. Strikes for little or no cause are commonplace. Well at last, a voice has been raised and we, as well as the British, should take heed. Surprisingly the voice comes, not from the opposition party the conservatives, but from a leader, indeed the leader, of the Labour Party, Prime Minister Callahan. He says, “The cozy world which we were told would go on forever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the chancellor's pen. Cutting taxes and deficit spending is gone. The prime minister, it is said, now sees socialism as an oversold superstition among the British working class. Well if it is true that somehow we take a parallel course to Britain, then we'd better listen to what the Labour Prime Minister told the British Labour Party at its recent convention. He obviously was not out to win a popularity contest and didn't, but even those who jeered the loudest must have wondered if they could equal his courage. “We must ask ourselves unflinchingly,” he said, “what is the cause of high unemployment?” and he answered his own question. “Quite simply and unequivocally it is caused by paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce. This is an absolute fact of life which no government, be it left or right, can alter. We have lived too long and borrowed money and even borrowed ideas and live in to trouble the world to be able in a matter of months or even a couple of years to enter the promised land.” He went on to say to a surly audience, “We used to think you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you that option no longer exists and insofar as it did exist, it worked by injecting inflation into the economy.” He added, “We can only become competitive by having the right kind of investment at the right kind of level and by significantly improving the productivity of both labor and capital nor will we succeed if we use confetti money to pay ourselves more than we produce.” I wonder if George Meaney would like to ask him to address the AFL-CIO convention, and while he's here, maybe he could speak to Congress. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.
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