If you are like millions of Americans who vacationed this summer, you paid top dollar for airline tickets, had little choice of airline, and were rewarded by long delays. But then, when you landed, you became a sovereign consumer again. You had your choice of car rental companies, hotels, and restaurants. You could shop around for the best prices, carefully measuring price against quality, and exercise real buying power.

Indeed, at the very same airport where one or two airlines monopolize routes and disrespect passengers, 10 or 15 auto rental companies, often side by side, compete vigorously and courteously for your business. How it is that car rental companies give you plenty of choice and high quality service, but not airlines?

One of my New Year's resolutions was to clean out my study. I am something of a pack rat. I have research files on every book and major article I've written going back to the 1970s, mostly sorted by topic. Throwing away outdated material under such headings as "budget," "unemployment," "savings rate," and "inflation," I realized just how miscast were so many of the assumptions and policy debates of the century's closing decades.

For instance, I have a shelfful of stuff slugged "competitiveness"--ponderous reports from think tanks, transcripts from congressional hearings, clippings, books. America was said to have a "competitiveness" problem, remember?