In our sixty years of labors, no one has had a more profound influence on the work of the American Enterprise Institute, or on American political discourse, than Irving Kristol. Combining philosophical depth with intense practicality and constant good cheer, he has, as President Bush has put it, "transformed political debate on every subject he approached, from economics to religion, from social welfare to foreign policy." He has also transformed the careers of a very large number of the men and women here tonight.

In recent years Irving has retired from active supervision of the two great journals he founded, The Public Interest and The National Interest; he has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and he has successfully traversed two major encounters with the Health Care Delivery System. Still he shows up at AEI regularly, and still he shows up everyone else with the fastest wit and most penetrating ideas at the table. It does AEI great honor, and it will inspire generations of policy scholars and activists to come, that Irving has agreed that AEI's annual award may henceforth be know as the Irving Kristol Award.

The first Kristol Award has been bestowed by our Council of Academic Advisers on Allan H. Meltzer. Allan's academic achievements began with his brilliant work on monetary theory in the 1960s, which made him the co-founder of the monetarist school with Milton Friedman. That work, revolutionary at the time, has long since been adopted in mainstream economic science. It has also, to a singular degree, been adopted in actual policy, to the immense benefit of the American economy, thanks to Allan's relentless efforts of twenty-seven years as chairman of the Shadow Open Market Committee. Allan is also a founder of Public Choice economics, which explains the composition of government taxing and spending in terms of the rational self-interest of voters and political groups, and has greatly improved the realism of policy research.

Honoring Allan is also an act of political magnanimity at a time of reversal and dissension at the Democratic Party. He is the first economist to receive AEI's annual award who get his start in the Kennedy administration and went on to be a prominent and vociferous opponent of Republican economic nostrums--that is, of the Nixon wage and price controls. Continuing in this vein, Allan recently reminded us that in 1962--a time like today of economic skittishness in the wake of a terrifying international crisis--it was President Kennedy who prescribed dramatic reductions in corporate and individual taxes. In the Congress, the Democrats' proposals for tax relief for corporations and the rich were lambasted by Republican deficit hawks, who said they would be fiscally irresponsible and inflationary; whereupon they passed and ushered in years of prosperity for the nation and the national treasury.

In recent years Allan has led the bipartisan Meltzer Commission on international financial reform. The group's recommendations have had a significant influence at the International Monetary Fund and on the Bush administration's proposals for overhauling the development-assistance programs; in geologic time they may even penetrate to the Gnomes of 18th and H at the World Bank. Allan's current Mr. Everest is his History of the Federal Reserve--the magnificent first volume out last fall, the second in progress, with time out to prepare the first Kristol Lecture, entitled "Leadership and Progress."

The 2003 Irving Kristol Award, a leather-bound set of the complete works and correspondence of Adam Smith, is inscribed:

To Allan H. Meltzer
Pioneer of political economy and policy reform
Teacher to students, scholars, and statesmen
Intellectual leader in the causes of liberty and progress