Third are the two generations of Americans born between 1936 and 1976.
We are (yes I am one of them) unfortunately: greedy, selfish, narcissistic, hedonistic, short-sighted, cowardly, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, overworked, spineless, ignorant, and dozens of other adjectives, all of which indicate that given our opportunities, we really are a great disappointment. Frank Zappa may have summed it up perfectly when he said, "Greed's the key."
In the time of the greatest period of scientific and cultural change in human history, most of us refused to grasp the nettle and pull the prize to ourselves. We "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out." We did not know the difference between being overworked and hard work; taking one for the team and being exploited; giving up what we've earned and giving up what we've stolen. We, the children and grandchildren of America's "Greatest Generation," have settled for second best.
When I was in high school, America had one billionaire: J. Paul Getty. And one income could support a family, buy a home, and provide all of the amenities of the American dream.
Now that America has several dozen billionaires, even two incomes no longer guarantee obtaining the American dream. And our accrued debt, both public and private, may turn that dream into the Nightmare on Wall Street, with Goldman Sachs as Freddy Kruger.
We believed the lies of men like Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, Bill Kristol, William F. Buckley, Grover Norquist, and Rupert Murdoch, who said we could have our cake and eat it too. Services and government protections were cut, but military expenditures went through the roof. The taxes of the rich went down, the taxes of the working and middle class rose, and the difference was made up by a national debt that tripled under President Reagan, and has more than tripled again after George W. Bush's Presidency. Building private prisons has become one of the few steady "growth" industries over the last thirty years, as the number of prisoners has nearly quintupled. There is something obviously and seriously wrong when the "Land of the Free" has more people behind bars than the totalitarian People's Republic of China, which has five times our population.
Many people have seized upon the ideals of Mill-freedom, self-sufficiency, limitations on government intervention in our lives-without understanding the tremendous individual responsibility and hard work within their communities that Mill's system entails. You have a duty to provide for the common defense under Mill's libertarianism, and that includes the defense of your community against Nature, including dams and levees for floods. You have a duty to protect the weak against the strong, and that includes participation in your government and court system. The libertarian philosophy as imagined by John Stuart Mill is not a system where you build your little hidey hole, climb into it, pull the hole in after you, and shoot at everything that you don't like that comes by your door.
It is a system where, in the words of Hippocrates, you first do no harm.
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