As I attended the launch of our American Free Enterprise campaign yesterday, I remembered this article of a few weeks ago in Forbes:

Let's set the record straight: Far from having failed, democratic capitalism is the world's greatest success story. No other system has improved the lives of so many people. The recent turmoil by no means mitigates the explosion of prosperity that has taken place since the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan enacted pro-market measures--low tax rates and less stringent regulation--that unleashed job-creating capital. The result: a surging economy that produced a flood of innovation, from personal computers and cellular phones to the Internet. Not only "the rich" but people at all income levels are today doing better.

The success of the U.S. did not go unnoticed. Free-market economic reforms--especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall--have brought an unprecedented surge of wealth to India, China, Brazil and nations in central and eastern Europe as well as in Latin America and Africa. Capitalism has helped usher in an era of wealth and economic growth that foreign-aid programs have tried but failed to do since World War II. The current recession should be seen historically as an interruption of, not an end to, this extraordinary expansion...

So where do we go from here? Free enterprise is temporarily under a cloud, but remember it's just that--temporary. What we are witnessing now is an Administration that is doing all it can to expand government domination of the economy. This is the last stand of 20th-century statism, the idea that free-market economies are inherently unstable and thus must be guided or even dominated from the commanding heights of a powerful government.

The notion that a handful of mandarin-like bureaucrats can constructively guide the economy; run our health care system; provide old-age pensions without having accumulated reserves during our working lives; fine-tune our financial system; dole out student loans; and engage in tens of thousands of countless other activities is preposterous...Experience shows that in managing or overseeing most things, government is suffocatingly incompetent...Washington's actions are generating a severe political reaction. The statists have overplayed their hand... The ultimate triumph of the principles of free-market capitalism, however, is not going to come without serious cost. The statists in Washington and elsewhere are doing--and will continue to do--immense harm before they are swept away. The cliché that it's always darkest before the dawn is true. So hold on. Just as happened under Reagan, a bright, new day is beckoning. But this time entrepreneurs and others will have to take on an additional task--making sure that more people learn about the basics of our free-enterprise system.

Be an entrepreneur, take the pledge.