- Shlaes, Amity.
Great Society.
New York: Harper, 2019.
ISBN 978-0-06-170642-4.
-
Adam Smith wrote, “There is a great deal of ruin in a
nation”—even though nations and their rulers may
adopt ruinous policies for a while, a great nation has deep
resources and usually has time to observe the consequences,
change course, and restore sound governance. But, as this book
shows, the amount of ruin in a nation is not unlimited, and
well-intended policies which fundamentally change the character
of the citizenry and their relationship to the state can have
ruinous consequences that cast a long shadow and may not be
reversible. Between 1960 and 1974, under three presidents:
Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, the United States, starting from
peace and prosperity unprecedented in the human experience,
reached for greatness and tragically embraced top-down,
centrally-planned, deficit-spending funded, and socialist (in
all but the forbidden name), policies which, by the mid 1970s,
had destroyed prosperity, debased the dollar and unleashed
ruinous inflation, wrecked the world's monetary system, incited
urban riots and racial strife, created an unemployable
underclass, destroyed neighbourhoods and built Soviet-style
public housing in their place, and set into motion the
destruction of domestic manufacturing and the middle class it
supported. It is a tragic tale, an utterly unnecessary
destruction of a once-great nation, as this magnificently
written and researched but unavoidably depressing history of the
era recounts.
May 2020 