The American Enterprise Institute was founded fifty-seven years ago this week to promote the idea that a free, competitive economy would promote individual well-being and social progress. This work has been carried out, for the most part, by thinking and writing.

This is not easy work, since human liberty does not arise naturally. It has only been in the second half of the twentieth century that there was any material gain in the number of free societies, and even these are, at best, only somewhat free. Everything conspires against freedom—not just obvious oppression, but also extravagant ambition, a desire to be all things to all people, and the relentless desire to suggest that if we reduce freedom by just a little bit more some good thing will happen.

But freedom is natural in the sense that it accords with human nature. Human ingenuity thrives when it is left alone. In the last few decades, capitalism won the struggle over Marxism—a struggle that most intellectuals long supposed, and some even hoped, that capitalism would lose. Capitalism won because it produces more wealth and a wider distribution of wealth that any economic rival.

Today almost everybody agrees that freedom is valuable. But the word has acquired some odd new meanings. One is that political freedom is more desirable than economic freedom, even though without the latter you cannot have very much of the former. Another is that freedom only works if everybody is first made equal, even though making people equal destroys the freedom it is supposed to produce. And another is that freedom is fine, but my business firm, my labor union, my professional association would be better off if it got a special subsidy. But freedom slowly drowns in subsidies. It cannot float in water filled with cartels.

AEI has made the argument for economic freedom, without losing sight of the necessary connection between a prosperous economy, a decent moral code, an openness to religious inquiry, and a strong military defense.

In making that argument, AEI has got the reputation as a professional debunker. Our typical publication—and there have been hundreds—usually says that some cherished policy won’t work. Wartime price controls won’t work. Fixed currency exchange rates won’t work. Government regulation of the prices charged by trains, trucks, banks, and airlines won’t work. Cutting military expenditures while the Soviet enemy was still alive won’t work. Our persistent debunking of bad ideas has caused, in Chris DeMuth’s phrase, many a rabid dogma not to bite.

For the last thirteen years Chris DeMuth has not only led AEI’s efforts, he has been one the most important policy intellectuals in this country. He combines to a degree rarely observed in any important person brilliant thought, skilled leadership, and human decency. And this he has achieved despite once having been a lawyer, a lecturer at Harvard, and an official of the Office of Management and Budget. Chris went to Harvard to play football and instead discovered Edward C. Banfield. Sometimes, higher education really works.

Chris represents a new generation of policy intellectuals, one born into an America in which true poverty is scarce, affluence is commonplace, leisure has expanded, and human capital has largely replaced physical capital as the great source of wealth.

Chris is one of those thinkers who understands the new world of which we are all a part. It is quite unlike the world in which I was raised, one in which many people honestly believed that class warfare was inevitable because a few rich folk had wealth and power that the many poor were denied. The struggle then was to find the money to make survival possible and to worry about those who got it without the struggle. The struggle was often difficult, but it had some small benefits: there was neither the time nor the money to support rave clubs, raise unwed children, fund a large drug trade, or make divorce a routine opportunity.

Today our problems are, as Chris has described them so eloquently, those that result from managing affluence.

Chris has led AEI to think hard and carefully about all of these matters, not only by selflessly raising money to keep the organization going, but even more by reading and editing almost everything it publishes, conferring with his colleagues on all of the issues they are working on, and speaking out with a voice that is precise, thoughtful, and incisive.

AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers thought we should hear from Chris while he is still younger than the organization he leads and when a new millennium has begun that will make us confront the problems of our new social reality.

Let me present to Chris DeMuth the Boyer Award for the year 2000. The prize is an extraordinary book, the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, the first bible to be illustrated by a single artist since 1865. Its creator, Barry Moser, worked twelve hours a day for four years to complete the 231 imaginative black-and-white engravings that make these volumes so special. His work was underwritten by Bruce Kovner, a collector of rare books, the chairman of the Caxton Corporation, and a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute. He is with us tonight, and we thank him for his generosity.

This is given to Chris DeMuth, who has combined intelligence, creativity, and decency in service to his family and his nation. The award is inscribed: