If we can continue in the spirit of cooperative adventure which has marked the recent years of our progress, we can expect further scientific advances, further increases in our standard of living, and a still wider enjoyment of democratic freedom.

No one, of course, can foretell the future exactly.  However, if we assume that we shall grow as fast in the future as we have grown in the past, we can get a good idea of how much our country should grow in the next 50 years.

At present our total national production is $255 billion a year.  Our working population and our output per worker are increasing.  If our productive power continues to increase at the same rate as it has increased over the past 50 years, our total national production 50 years from now will be nearly four times as much as it is today.  Allowing for the expected growth in population, this would mean that the real income of the average family in the year 2000 A.D. would be about three times what it is today.

These are estimates of what we can do in the future, but we can reach these heights only if we follow the right policies.  We have learned by bitter experience that progress is not automatic—­that wrong policies lead to depression and disaster.  We cannot achieve these gains unless we have a stable economy and avoid the catastrophes of boom and bust that have set us back in the past.

These gains cannot be achieved unless our businessmen maintain their spirit of initiative and enterprise and operate in a competitive economy.  They cannot be achieved unless our workingmen and women and their unions help to increase productivity and obtain for labor a fair share of the benefits of our economic system.  They cannot be achieved unless we have a stable and prosperous agriculture.  They cannot be achieved unless we conserve and develop our natural resources in the public interest.  Our system will not work unless our people are healthy, well-educated, and confident of the future.  It will not work unless all citizens can participate fully in our national life.

In achieving these gains the Government has a special responsibility to help create and maintain the conditions which will permit the growth we know is possible.  Foremost among these conditions is the need for a fair distribution of our increasing prosperity among all the great groups of our population who help to bring it about-labor, business, agriculture.

Businessmen must continue to have the incentives necessary for investment and for the development of new lines of enterprise.  In the future growth of this country, lie possibilities for hundreds of thousands of new and independent businesses.  As our national production increases, as it doubles and redoubles in the next 50 years, the number of independent and competing enterprises should also increase.  If the number does not increase, our constantly growing economy will fall under the control of a few dominant economic groups whose powers will be so great that they will be a challenge to democratic institutions.