Anyone who reads history realizes our best years were after the war, when unions were strong, when manufacturing was here, when consumers rebuilt lives after the war, when taxes were the highest on those who gained most from America's freedoms, what changed? Americans became spoiled and isolated and businesses and the wealthy fought the New Deal and Great Society with money, education, and think tanks that do anything but think. And guess what, the education worked, the entitlement worked and no longer did America live up to its principles. Good stuff below for the reader of history.
"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them." Tony Judt 'Ill Fares the Land'
"A great transformation of American politics began during the years that Ronald Reagan was in the White House. This might not, at first, have appeared the likely outcome of his two administrations. Conservative activists (the same ones who would in later years celebrate Reagan as a saint) struggled during the 1980s with various disappointments: as president, Reagan did not end abortion, he met with Soviet leader Mikhail Corbachev, and he failed to eliminate the welfare state or even notably shrink government bureaucracies. And the enthusiasm within the business community that followed his election did not last long, as the economy sank into a deep recession, with unemployment rising to nearly 10 percent in 1982. As the manufacturing belt began to rust over, political conflicts between industrial companies desperately seeking subsidies and protection and those businesses that were able to thrive in global free markets grew more heated and intense. Tensions erupted between the owners of stock - newly confident and aggressive about using their financial power to compel management to do anything to raise returns - and career corporate executives. Today, the economic changes that began during the 1980s have an air of inevitability about them - the advent of globalization, the shift to a service economy. But at the time these transformations proved devastating to many of the manufacturing companies that had once most vociferously protested the New Deal.
And yet over the course of the decade the old skepticism toward business that had been born in the Great Depression and reawakened for a new generation in the Vietnam era finally began to disappear. The economic transformations of the decade would be interpreted through the framework of the free market vision. The 1970s campaigns to revive the image of capitalism among college students bore fruit in the 1980s. Universities created new centers for the study of business themes such as entrepreneurship. Students in Free Enterprise, a group started in 1975 to bring students together to "discuss what they might do to counteract the stultifying criticism of American business," thrived on small college campuses, funded by companies like Coors, Dow Chemical, and Walmart (as well as the Business Roundtable). The group organized battles of the bands, at which prizes would be doled out to the best pro-business rock anthems, helped silkscreen T-shirts with pro-capitalist messages, and created skits based on Milton Friedman's writings, which college students would perform in local elementary schools. In the workplace, the decline of the old manufacturing cities of [he North and Midwest and the rise of the sprawling suburbs of the Sunbelt metropolises marked the rise of a new economic culture, dominated by companies such as Walmart and Home Depot and Barnes & Noble." Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
"Capitalism is the ownership and use of the concrete but dynamic elements in a society - what is commonly known as the means of production. A capitalist is someone who produces more capital through the production of the means he owns. This necessitates the periodic reinvestment of part of the capital earned into the repair, modernization and expansion of the means. Capitalism is therefore the ownership of an abstraction called capital, rendered concrete by its ownership of the means of production, which through actual production creates new capital.... However, capitalism as conceived today tends to revolve around something called the profit motive, even though profit is neither a cause of capitalism nor at the heart of the capitalist action. Profit is a useful result of the process, nothing more. As for the ownership of the means of production, this has been superseded by their management. And yet, to manage is to administer, which is a bureaucratic function. Alternately, there is a growing reliance upon the use of capital itself to produce new capital. But that is speculation, not production. Much of the development of the means of production is now rejected as unprofitable and, frankly, beneath the dignity of the modern manager, who would rather leave such labour and factory-intensive "dirty" work to Third World societies. Finally , the contemporary idea of capitalism grandly presents "service" as its new sophisticated manifestation. But the selling of one's own skills is not a capitalist art. And most of the jobs being created by the service industries are with the exception of the high-technology sector descendants of the pre-eighteenth-century commerce in trade and services." p360 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
"It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government." Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia
"The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government." Thomas Jefferson to A. Coray
"It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that [a society without government, as among our Indians] is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population." Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
