Karlgaard is soooo right....

I was born in 1962, grew up in the '70s, and heard all these prophecies of doom and gloom. I didn't like them, but wound up believing them, what with our (needless) defeat in Vietnam, the energy crises of '73 and '80, Jimmy Carter's "moral equivalent of war" speech to the effect that we should make do with less and be grateful for it, high (~10%) unemployment, and high (~15%) inflation. Surely the Republic was doomed.....

I remember a lecture from my father on the facts of our family's economic life, delivered one day in 1980. (Dad was really good at lecturing his only son, who sometimes was in need of lecturing.) Dad was a middle-level Federal civil servant (and a damned good one, I might add) and he told me how our financial circumstances took a big hit in the '70s. In 1969, when my sister (born in '51) went off to college, Dad was earning about $18,000 a year-- big money in those days, enough to send my sister off to a private college and me to a private elementary school. A decade later, when he and Mom were sending me off to college, I had to apply for financial aid, and I think my asking why that should be so touched off the "lecture". Dad told me that, even though his pay had gone up over the years, to $30,000 a year (in 1980), between inflation and income-tax bracket-creep, the buying-power of his take-home pay was two-thirds (maybe) of what it had been in 1969.

Looking back, I better understand what he was trying to tell me. Mom and Dad were married in 1950, but it wasn't until 1972 that they felt they could afford to buy a new car (a '72 Ford station wagon that set them back about $5,000). Until then they had always driven used cars, and with their reverses in the '70s continued to drive used cars-- they didn't buy another new car until about 1990.

In 1965, Mom and Dad felt prosperous enough to (gasp!) build a house in suburban Baltimore, a nice "Colonial" style house, solidly-built and quite spacious, and they fretted at the economies needed to meet the $128 per month mortgage. By 1974, we had to move, and had to move into a much smaller house, and even though the house was smaller and in an area with a low cost of living, Mom and Dad still worried over the $150 a month mortgage. I'm sure that being children of the Great Depression (Mom and Dad were born in the late '20s) didn't help-- they had a horror of debt.

So, I went off to college, studied perhaps only indifferently (much to my parents' irritation) and got a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. But I still believed the doom-and-gloom talk that was in the air. I thought President Reagan was good for the country-- what a breath of fresh air he was after the sackcloth-and-ashes rhetoric of Carter!-- and it wasn't until I got out into the real world, serving as a lieutenant in the Army (I had been in ROTC in college) that I began to understand just how benighted I had been all those years. I firmly believe that, had I not been so.... poisoned?... by the doom-and-gloom zeitgeist of my youth, I would have done a lot better in college, and would have made more of myself in my early working life.

It's probably only since 1990 that I've begun to understand what utter bullsh*t the Club of Rome's 1972 study, "Limits to Growth", really is. I'd like to expand on that, but I've already written more than I intended to. Check out this link: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ for the details. His book, "A Step Farther Out" can be found on Amazon.com . And the scary part is that Pournelle's rebuttal of "Limits to Growth" has been out for a quarter-century now, but we still get the "We're all DOOMED!" crap from the literati and glitterati.

Between the Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich, an entire generation was demoralized, and they came to believe that, no matter what we do, we're all doomed to perish in some sort of ecological Gotterdamerung.

My sister and her husband are pretty sensible types, but they're products of their upbringing, and my brother-in-law (who's now 63) is especially so, in the sense that he's a college professor (but not really pointy-headed, though) of urban affairs and public policy, and so learned the ideology of "planning" at the knee of John Kenneth Galbraith and his disciples, back in the '60s. Too many people he works with just can't buy into the idea that maybe people should be allowed to experiment, to "do their own thing"-- nope, they have to be controlled, their energies channelled into approved activities. The planners know best, of course. My brother-in-law has a hard time resisting the peer-pressure to conform. So some of their attitudes are right out of the '70s. They have two wonderful children, and so they were willing to take a bet on the future being a good place. But other things make me wonder-- my brother-in-law despises Bill Gates and Microsoft, almost as if Gates is the Devil himself, and Microsoft a cabal of demons. I'm no fan of Microsoft either, but it's a free market, so why doesn't my brother-in-law use Linux and its various MS Office-like accessories? Jeez.

I'm glad I've lived to this point, to see our first tentative steps into space with the idea of staying there-- Apollo and Skylab, and now the International Space Station, were nice, but the entrepreneurs like Burt Rutan are the future, and it's coming at us fast. It's so wonderful to see Pournelle's predictions coming true, and to see how one day a stake will be driven through the heart of the Club of Rome and all its works.

And too many of my older Baby-Boomer siblings just don't get it. For them, it's still 1968.

It's so sad, really.

P.S.

And that's why people like Andrew, nice guy though he is, just crack me up with their complaints about how bad things are now.

Andrew, not to pick on you, but.... you have NO IDEA what "bad times" are. I do know, 'cause I was there. The '70s sucked, and the '60s weren't all that good either, not if one loved liberty in those days.

And that's why I give you a hard time, Andrew, when you prattle on about how greater government involvement in health care would actually *improve* our health care system. I am utterly mystified why ANYONE would want to return to those godawful days.

I hope you understand now why I "lit into you" a month or two back on the subject.....

P.P.S.

Not only have so many of my Baby-Boomer siblings been poisoned by the doomers-and-gloomers, but many of my parents' generation have had their attitudes and dreams blighted by the g-and-d'ers too. I know my father thought the country was headed down the tubes in the '70s, and he still wasn't very optimistic in the years before his death in '97. I have to wonder how many other older people, some still active, others retired but still influential, are still under the sway of the false (and now-failing) doctrine of "Doom!" peddled to them in *their* prime 30-40 years ago? And since many of them are still in positions of authority, how much damage is being inflicted on people of my generation, and younger?

Yeah, I guess I'm really "wound up" tonight. :)

Heck, even children of the 80s— like myself— got to wonder if the world was really going to end in nuclear holocaust. I was a blithe child and didn't really absorb the fact that I lived at the only ground zero on the West Coast (Sacramento had, at the time, three military bases as well as being the capital of the fifth-largest economy of the world). Imagine my surprise when my high school history professor showed us a declassified document that showed the US best guess as to where the nukes were going to fall... and there's a bright red spot over my hometown, with a fallout trail extending east.

It has been over half my life since the Berlin Wall fell and I still remember the dreams of waking up in a depopulated land. And just think, the prospects of a nuclear war were LESS in the 80s than in previous decades, and this fact was known and accepted.

I'm a cynical optimist. I think people can be nasty and capricious, and work against their own best insterests— in other words, be human— and yet, everything is going to turn out all right. I've worked the polls and when people start freaking out, I remind them that no matter the outcome, nobody truly believes that there will be tanks on the streets in the morning, and they relax and say, "I never thought of it that way."