President Duderstadt, thank you all very much. Thank you for that warm welcome. I want to salute the president, salute Governor and Mrs. John Engler, Representatives of the Congress -- Pursell, Upton, and Vander Jagt, and distinguished Regents, and especially I want to pay my respects to our fellow honorary degree recipients. Barbara and I are very grateful for this high honor. Before this, there wasn't one lawyer in the family, and now we have two.

The last time I was in Ann Arbor, we commemorated John Kennedy's unveiling of the Peace Corps. And as your commencement program indicates, Lyndon Johnson introduced the Great Society in a University of Michigan commencement address.

Today, I want to talk to you about this historic moment. Your commencement -- your journey into the ``real world'' -- coincides with this nation's commencement into a world freed from cold war conflict and thrust into an era of cooperation and economic competition.

The United States plays a defining role in the world. Our economic strength, our military power, and most of all, our national character brought us to this special moment. When our policies unleashed the economic expansion of the 1980's, we exposed forever the failures of socialism and reaffirmed our status as the world's greatest economic power. When we sent troops to the Gulf, we showed that we take principles seriously enough to risk dying for them.

But there's another message. There's another message. We also take them seriously enough to help others in need. Today, men and women of Operation Provide Comfort toil on behalf of suffering Kurds. And today, our thoughts and prayers also go to the hundreds of thousands of people victimized by a vicious cyclone in Bangladesh. Our Government has sent aid to that stricken land. Dozens of private agencies have sprung into action as well, sending food, water, supplies, and donations. The humanitarian instinct runs deep in our people, always has. It is an essential element of our American character.

Our successes have banished the Vietnam-era phantoms of doubt and distrust. In my recent travels around the country I have felt an idealism that we Americans supposedly had lost. People have faith in the future. And they ask: What next? And they ask: How can I help?

We have rediscovered the power of the idea that toppled the Berlin Wall and led a world to strike back at Saddam Hussein. Like generations before us, we have begun to define for ourselves the promise of freedom.

I'd like to talk today about the nature of freedom and how its demands will shape our future as a nation.

Let me start with the freedom to create. From its inception, the United States has been a laboratory for creation, invention, and exploration. Here, merit conquers circumstance. Here, people of vision -- Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, Martin Luther King, Jr. -- outgrow rough origins and transform a world. These achievements testify to the greatness of our free enterprise system. In past ages, and in other economic orders, people could acquire wealth only seizing goods from others. Free enterprise liberates us from this Hobbesian quagmire. It lets one person's fortune become everyone's gain.

This system, built upon the foundation of private property, harnesses our powerful instincts for creativity. It gives everyone an interest in shared prosperity, in freedom, and in respect. No system of development ever has nurtured virtue as completely and rigorously as ours. We've become the most egalitarian system in history -- and one of the most harmonious -- because we let people work freely toward their destinies.

When governments try to improve on freedom -- say, by picking winners and losers in the economic market -- they fail.