Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney kicked off the Spring 2010 7x24Exchange Conference, End-to-End Reliability: The Next Generation. Romney talked for 60 minutes before a full conference room at the Boca Raton Resort and Beach Club. Earlier in the day, Bob Cassiliano, chair of the 7x24Exchange Board, had announced attendance at 664. Romney developed themes described in his book, No Apologies: The Case for American Greatness. Cassiliano's remarks on the state of business set the stage for Romney. Cassiliano noted that prospects for new business have improved, but that taxes are up, but compliance insurance is getting unreasonable. He also complained that health insurance costs had increased 56 percent and 69 percent in the states his company does business. Romney focused on government's lack of recognition of how markets and private companies work, and the affect this disconnect has on the economy.  Romney said that he was amazed at the figures that our governments calculate and publish, when he first took office. He said that few in government use the data. "We have answers before we do the data." he said, "I was shocked that issues that were important hadn't been studied, that no one looked at the data." he buttressed this argument with examples from education and housing policy debates. Finally Romney argued about the importance of the survival of the American economic system, because it was the only one of the four dominant models to include political and personal freedom as one of its key tenets. He suggested that the other models depended on an authoritarian government. Romney said that he remained optimistic that personal liberty brought about efficiencies that gave the American system the advantages it needed to survive, but he railed that policies being formulated in Washington, DC, over the last several decades were moving us away from the model that built the nation into the world's strongest nation. He sited both recent examples such as cap and trade and new dividend taxes but also the aversion of the nation's politicians over the last decades to managing the growth of entitlements. He revisited parts of this answer in a response to a question from SyskaHennessy's Chris Johnston.