A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

congealed into a debased neoliberalism, the sociopathic operating system that has dominated Boomer politics, Right and Left, for more than three decades.

consumption over production, dogmatic deregulation instead of thoughtful oversight, permanent deficits instead of fiscal prudence, and capitalism liberated from the bounds of the state, though always free to replenish itself at the federal trough in the event “sub-prime mortgages,” “junk bonds,” or “collateralized debt obligations” somehow lived up to their names.

Nixon’s lieutenant, Spiro Agnew, tossed off the most memorable summary: “Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated [in] a contemporary antagonism known as ‘The Generation Gap.’”

Inequality is a consequence of a capitalist system for which there is no replacement, as the utter failures of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the Soviet Union showed (many of which proved that “communist” regimes also had extreme inequality).

Depressing and true.

Capitalism is, if not a perfect machine for generating general prosperity, then the best one yet devised and the only one conceivable in America.

Northern Europeans have vastly more generous welfare states and higher personal savings rates; they understand that even in generous systems, individual responsibility remains paramount.

Gabler, Neal. “The Secret Shame of the Middle-Class Americans: Nearly Half of Americans Would Have Trouble Finding $400 to Pay for an Emergency. I’m One of Them.” Atlantic, May 2016.