Our competitive enterprise system depends on the energy of free human beings, limited by prudent restraints in law, using free markets to plan, organize and distribute production, and spurred by the prospect of reward for successful effort.  This system has developed our resources.  It has marvelously expanded our productive capacity.  Against the record of all other economic systems devised through the ages, this competitive system has proved the most creative user of human skills in the development of physical resources, and the richest rewarder of human effort.

This is still true in this era when improved living standards and rising national requirements are accompanied by swift advances in technology and rapid obsolescence in machines and methods.  Typical of these are the strides made in construction of plants to produce electrical energy from atomic power and of laboratories and installations for the application of this new force in industry, agriculture and the healing arts.  These developments make it imperative—­to assure effective functioning of our enterprise system—­that the Federal Government concern itself with certain broad areas of our economic life.  Most important of these is: 

Agriculture

Our farm people are not sharing as they should in the general prosperity.  They alone of all major groups have seen their incomes decline rather than rise.  They are caught between two millstones—­rising production costs and declining prices.  Such harm to a part of the national economy so vitally important to everyone is of great concern to us all.  No other resource is so indispensable as the land that feeds and clothes us.  No group is more fundamental to our national life than our farmers.

In successful prosecution of the war, the nation called for the utmost effort of its farmers.  Their response was superb, their contribution unsurpassed.  Farmers are not now to be blamed for the mountainous, price-depressing surpluses produced in response to wartime policies and laws that were too long continued.  War markets are not the markets of peacetime.  Failure to recognize that basic fact by a timely adjustment of wartime legislation brought its inevitable result in peacetime—­surpluses, lower prices and lower incomes for our farmers.

The dimensions of government responsibility are as broad and complex as the farm problem itself.  We are here concerned not only with our essential continuing supplies of food and fiber, but also with a way of life.  Both are indispensable to the well-being and strength of the nation.  Consideration of these matters must be above and beyond politics.  Our national farm policy, so vital to the welfare of farm people and all of us, must not become a field for political warfare.  Too much is at stake.

Our farm people expect of us, who have responsibility for their government, understanding of their problems and the will to help solve them.  Our objective must be to help bring production into balance with existing and new markets, at prices that yield farmers a return for their work in line with what other Americans get.