thewhitrbbit wrote:
When people bring in slaves and voting rights, it's strawmen arguments.
Yes there are lots of things that needed to be improved, but there are also time tested values that don't break down.
I doubt a lot of people would want to go back to slavery and women not being allowed to vote, but I sure would love to go back to the day when people valued hard work, responsibility, when communities worked together to help each other, when people would take any kind of work they could find before charity, when people weren't to good to do manual labor.
There's plenty of bad stuff we can leave in the past, but progress hasn't been perfect.
You seem to be fantasizing about an ideal nation that never existed.
Certainly more people did manual work in the first half of the twentieth century than there are today. But that has a great deal to do with the way automation has supplanted manual labour. There were fewer people relying on social assistance--because there was no social assistance on which to rely. But this was also a time when a man (and I use the gender exclusive deliberately) could raise a family on the wages that he earned from a single full-time job. This was also a time when every worker could aspire to own his own house (again, I use the gender exclusive deliberately).
So does the fault lie with workers who are too lazy to do the jobs (that don't actually exist anymore...) or with employers who have persistently driven down wages in real terms so that a person who works full time can no longer aspire to raise a family on a single income?
You have romanticized a fictional past, that existed only in the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. Look back at what life was truly like for people of your economic level, and tell me which age you would rather live in.
_________________
--James