What made it possible? Daniel Henninger gets it exactly right in his WSJ column today: capitalism. More precisely, the innovations that come about under conditions of free market competition.

Our Dear Leader Obama, however, dislikes the idea of putting “blind faith in the market.” He is enthralled with the idea of the managed economy, with government regulators and tax collectors at every turn. The more of that, the less dynamism in the economy. Big government sucks the air out.

What Obama and his clueless zealots don’t understand is that “the market” is not a thing. It’s a network of millions of individuals and organizations, each trying to get ahead by producing goods and services other people want. Leave that system alone and you get economic progress. We don’t have to take that on faith. We have centuries of evidence. The “blind faith” rests on the notion that state coercion can improve upon the results of freedom. History, especially in the 20th century, is full of evidence to the contrary.