Your opinion and you are entitled to it.
Mine is that the USA had its finest years from 1946 to 1964 because the government stayed OUT of our lives and let cream rise to the top.
But that's just my opinion...
I would give it a little more - 1946 to sometime in the 1970s were our best years.
I think the oil embargo, stagflation, and the start of outsourcing in the 1970s were the start of the rot.
And all the time, money, and life wasted on the Vietnam War didn't help either.
The 1980s and 1990s and even early 2000s were still pretty good for the country, because the rot that started in the 1970s hadn't undone all of the postwar progress yet. I would say things started getting bad in about 2005 and in the years leading up to the recession in 2008, when the wheels fell off completely. It was a little iffy for the few years after that, about which way things would go. But I would say it's been consistently getting worse since the mid-2010s to now.
The difference is that I think it was for the opposite reason you stated - it wasn't that the government stayed out of our lives and let the cream rise to the top, it was the opposite, that they actually cared about the common good and helping people move up the economic ladder. The creation of the modern middle class, was a huge step forward in becoming more civilized.
Contrast with today, where the government doesn't care about the common good anymore because of the revolving door between business and politics, and lets the cream rise to the top - and it's been disastrous for most people. It's like I say, most people benefit from a society that helps them. Most people don't do well in Darwinian competition, but it's not a bug, it's a feature.
I think we need a world that works for the people who aren't "brains" - which is a world in which the "brains" also do well, because it's never bad to be an achiever. It's not as if there were no intelligent or successful people in the postwar era.
But a world that works
only for the "brains", is going to be misery for everyone else.
So it begs the question, should the point of life still be Darwinian competition?
Or should we use modern science and technology to make a new, less miserable point to life?
That's what I grew up thinking and believing was the point. It was very disappointing and disillusioning to grow up and see us doubling down on competition instead of evolving beyond it.
This is that feeling I always talk about - technology is improving, but quality of life for most people is getting worse. And if technology is not improving our overall quality of life, then I'm not that impressed with it after all.
I always thought that every time we moved away from survival of the fittest, the human race not only became more civilized, but also happier. Moving back towards it seems to have the opposite effect.
