Judd Gregg: “I want to speak about a series of initiatives that I have introduced to try to address what I see as the major public…”

“I want to speak about a series of initiatives that I have introduced to try to address what I see as the major public policy concerns as we move into the next century, on the fiscal side of the ledger, that affect people in their lives. As we move out of the 20th century, we have seen a period where, certainly throughout most of the 20th century, there was a sense that, through a centralized Government, through an economy dominated by a Government, you could manage the lives and affairs of individuals and improve their lifestyle. Of course, the most exaggerated example of this was communism and the Russian revolution, which began the major Communist state of this century or any time. And it did not work. One of the great truths of the 20th century, of which there have been about three, one of the great truths is that communism--the concept that the state can manage the marketplace and make people better off by requiring that people function under a top-down system where their lives and their style of economic production is controlled by a central mechanism--simply does not function effectively. Instead of producing prosperity, it produced despair. Instead of producing freedom, it produced totalitarianism.”