Our competitive enterprise system depends on the energy of free human
beings, limited by prudent restraints in law, using free markets to plan,
organize and distribute production, and spurred by the prospect of reward
for successful effort. This system has developed our resources. It has
marvelously expanded our productive capacity. Against the record of all
other economic systems devised through the ages, this competitive system
has proved the most creative user of human skills in the development of
physical resources, and the richest rewarder of human effort.
This is still true in this era when improved living standards and rising
national requirements are accompanied by swift advances in technology and
rapid obsolescence in machines and methods. Typical of these are the
strides made in construction of plants to produce electrical energy from
atomic power and of laboratories and installations for the application of
this new force in industry, agriculture and the healing arts. These
developments make it imperative--to assure effective functioning of our
enterprise system--that the Federal Government concern itself with certain
broad areas of our economic life. Most important of these is: