But we had learned from local governments that actually work that that was all that works to bring the crime rate down. So we jammed through this bill and the people who were against it screamed and hollered that I was presuming to tell police chiefs what to do. And we now have the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest murder rate in 30 years, partly because of the improvement in the economy, but partly because law enforcement works better. So I think that there is a way in which we should look not only to the internal operations of our own government, how our systems work and how they serve the people, but how the relationship between government and the private sectors and national governments and local governments can work more effectively. If we learned anything from 1998 and the financial turmoil we experienced all over the world, it is that in the world we live in competition is good, but failure of our competitors is bad.
Competition is good, but the failure of our competitors is bad.
We want competition to work within a framework in which we all do better, in which we urge each other on, economically, socially, politically, every way to higher levels of humane development so that the United States, for example, clearly has an interest when the government of Russia tries to put in place a system that will fairly assess and collect taxes. Quite apart from the obvious interest we have, and all of you do, in having a system that will help us to continue to reduce the nuclear threat, the United States has an interest in the success of governments in Asia developing regulatory systems that will minimize the spread of financial contagion. We have an interest in nations in Africa and in Latin America and elsewhere who are trying to develop with limited resources the very best possible education and health systems. We have an interest in learning from nations all over the world that have done a better job than we have in managing their natural resources and developing sound environmental policy while growing their economy. And we're interested in the experiments in Great Britain and the experiments in the Netherlands and in other countries.