I'm proud of the role the American labor movement has played historically in fighting to make education possible for everyone's child. We share the b… - Walter Reuther

I'm grateful for the contribution [private enterprise] made, but even in the early days of capitalism the government helped a great deal. The railroads got tremendous land grants, the steamship companies got subsidies—they still get subsidies–the airlines got subsidies; none of these great industries developed without some assistance from the government. The whole question here, Mike, the whole question is not are you opposed or are you in favor of government intervention into certain areas of our free society. The question is: Whenever people are either unable or unwilling to do what must be done to maintain the health and advance the well-being of the whole society, then government is the only instrument that the whole people have to look to to do that job. Now, I'm for limiting that; I'm for encouraging voluntary nongovernmental approaches. This is why I try to do everything I can at the collective bargaining table; this is why we fought on the Social Security front, on the pension front. But when you've got a problem like education or medical care for the aged that you can't solve on a nongovernmental basis, then the government must do the job.

I happen to believe that this is the crux of where we're going in terms of the future of the American economy. I think that the basic problem is to find a way to work out the competing equities among the three groups—the worker, the stockholder, and the consumer—so that we share the abundance in a way that would create the dynamics of growth and expansion.

I think one of the things we need to do is to avoid the tragic waste of human potential.