Virginia Hall
Jul 29, 2017 · 2 min read

An excellent article.

You ask rhetorically,

American leaders are pretending like the relationship above is a great, confounding mystery.

It is too bad you are young and missed out on the world before Reagan who turn Marx on his head. Marx said capitalists never made anything. The workers did. Reagan said the government never made anything. The capitalists did.

Reagan sold a generation of people on the idea that government was the enemy of progress and prosperity and if capitalist could be left free to do as they wanted, “all yachts would rise.”

This generation does not remember leaders like Eisenhower, or Kennedy, or even the ill-fated LBJ. They do not remember when under Eisenhower there was all but a maximum wage that insured prosperity for people in the middle because those making windfalls paid 93% taxes — and this was under a Republican.

I am Tommy Lee Jones age and I share the lament, “Those men knew their worth.”

And somewhere along the line American got sold on the wrong idea. Coming out of World War Two we were all in it together, but coming out of Vietnam it was ever man for himself. We’ve become very greedy in our zero sum game mentality.

Take for example health care. If a plague or a yellow fever epidemic spreads amongst the poor who can’t afford insurance, all the insurance in the world is not going to protect the rest of the public.

We lost our way long ago when we stopped caring about our neighbors.

This America is not the America I grew up in. It’s like Back To The Future II where someone has messed with the timeline.

Biff in Back to the Future II doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone but himself.

What has happened to us?

    Virginia Hall

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