To the friends of human freedom and progress, it is difficult to imagine a time more pleasing and full of promise than our own. Americans are today the richest, freest people the world has ever known. We enjoy unprecedented levels of personal health, mobility, safety, education, and amenity. The best of our popular and high culture is wonderfully good. We may not be in a Great Awakening, but religious belief and observance are widespread. We may not have abolished the business cycle, but it has moderated enormously in the post-war period (coinciding exactly with the American Enterprise Institute’s presence on the scene). Pollsters report levels of social contentment never seen before.

America does face some serious problems. But to a remarkable degree our problems are no longer those of obtaining and securing freedom and prosperity. Those problems, which were human-kind’s central concerns from the dawn of history through the twentieth century, have now in all essentials been solved. They have been solved by the progress of science and technology and of social, legal, and economic institutions—which is to say by intellectual endeavor, trial and error, and the passage of time. We may lose the solutions through war or catastrophe, but they are now existent knowledge, part of the evolved genome of human practice. That is the real millennium story.

Today’s most serious problems are moral as well as institutional. And they are in many ways the result of our prosperity—the characteristic problems of a super-affluent, mass-upper-middle-class society.

The Importance of Competition

Our wealth and freedom may be generating new problems but they are, after all, tremendous assets, not liabilities! They ought to help us cope with moral and institutional problems as well as material problems.

An important principle for harnessing our wealth and freedom is competition. Americans across the political spectrum are individualistic, pro-choice, and anti-monopoly: they favor a wide scope for individual preference and know that competition, even tough and unruly competition, promotes not only choice on the demand side but quality, discipline, and integrity on the supply side.

Those hardy sentiments are building blocks for many practical reforms. Competition is already the first principle of contemporary school and welfare reform, grounded as they are in demonopolization of government services and reinvigoration of diverse community institutions. It should also be a central principle of those who wish to maintain a healthy, productive culture. That may seem like an odd suggestion, as powerful new forms of competition appear to many to be the essence of the problem—Hollywood competing with the family, careers and romance competing with parenthood, MTV competing with reading and conversation, liposuction competing with diet and exercise. But religion has always been far more robust in America than in Europe, which suggests that the advantages of competition over monopoly can extend to culture as well as material things. If raising a child, preserving a marriage, or marketing a good movie, poem, or political doctrine is more demanding than it used to be, then the tougher demands may lead to stronger efforts and better supply. Better supply could compensate for the weakening of social norms and sanctions, and in time generate new ones.

Many of today’s most aggressive cultural threats come from political monopolies—victim feminism in the public schools, the Federal Communications Commission’s hostility toward religious broadcasting. The times call not for more regimentation but the opposite: a gale of constructive competition from new schools, textbooks, magazines, museums, orphanages, academic and literary societies, bar associations, and think tanks.

The American Character

Some social critics believe that we have become the people portrayed in a famous gloomy passage in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and, at a high-tech level, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Those are people who have become childlike, self- absorbed, and politically anesthetized by "petty and banal pleasures" under the ministrations of a government that "gladly works for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it." But that isn’t us. We are a pleasure-loving people to be sure, and with abundant sources of gratification. But we are also skeptical, self-reliant, ethically serious and at times highly moralistic, and possessed of a strong patriotism attached to a way of life rather than to government. Those singular attributes of the American character are undimmed by postmodernity and jostle to cope with its problems.

It was not love of luxury that created this nation, held it together, and raised it up to its current preeminence; it was our fierce independence and love of liberty. Having in this manner achieved prosperity, we will not succumb to it.