Success Quote by Fred L. Turner

There is a salesman’s shrug baked into “I get a bit of a kick,” as if the speaker is admitting the thrill before defending the policy. Turner doesn’t frame exporting “private enterprise and incentives” as ideology or national mission; he frames it as pleasure. That word choice matters. It recasts what can be a hard-edged, consequential project - spreading a particular economic system into places that may not have asked for it - as something almost recreational, a hobby with geopolitical reach.

“Exporting” is the tell. Markets aren’t treated as cultures or histories; they’re treated as destinations, like a product rollout. And the paired terms “private enterprise” and “incentives” are classic managerial shorthand: clean, frictionless, hard to argue with in the abstract. They don’t mention labor, regulation, inequality, or the messy reality that incentives can mean both opportunity and coercion. The language is engineered to sound pragmatic, even benevolent, while keeping the power dynamics offstage.

The subtext is confidence that these tools are portable and universally motivating - that you can swap in profit signals and watch societies reorganize accordingly. That assumption has a distinctly late-20th-century flavor, when American business leaders often spoke as if capitalism were not just an economic model but a transferable technology for modernization.

Turner’s intent, then, reads less like persuasion than self-portraiture: the pleasure of influence, the comfort of abstraction, and the quiet belief that what works for business should be allowed to stand in for what works for people.