Why the Fifties Loom Large in Our Thinking

National Review ^ | December 8th 2020 | DAN MCLAUGHLIN

[Osage Orange]

Well we didn't have these....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpDbnWh_-aQ

[hanamizu]

That just about describes my life 20 miles away in West Whittier.

---

Let’s take a trip down Whittier Boulevard!

[colorado tanker]

My grandfather was mostly unemployed during the Depression and times were hard for the family.

My father turned old enough to join the Navy in 1945 and became the first in his family to go to college on the GI Bill. The economy was booming and he got a management job with a GM company.

We had one of those newfangled "ranch" style houses in a neighborhood full of boomer families. Us kids would head out to play and be gone for hours. Nobody worried for our safety - they had no reason to.

Life in the 50's sure beat years of depression and war. Then came the 60's when the Democrats tried driving the country to hell. The Kennedy and King assassinations, Vietnam War, race riots, campus riots, the sexual revolution, the Berlin Wall, Cubar Missile Crisis ... Libs like to think of the 60's as some kind of golden age because of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts, but that's about the only good thing that happened. And without Republican support even that wouldn't have happened.

[bigbob]

Because the 50’s and first half of the 60’s were the last time this country was doing things pretty much right.

[SuperLuminal]

More communist-driven revisionist history...

Before this next year is over, traditional Constitutional America will no longer even remembered...

The onslaught, as it always has in newly minted communist Nations, now turns to the complete erasure of the past and replacement with superstition, propaganda, distortion, falsehoods, and vile lies all designed to wipe all memory of the Nation’s greatness from the serfs psyche...

The novel 1984 doesn’t even come close to the dark tyrannical nature of the future now guaranteed for future generations...

[Fiji Hill]

Let’s take a trip down Whittier Boulevard

I do that just about every day.

[huckfillary]

I was born in ‘53. My memories of the ‘50s are sketchy. But, my father told me often as I got older that the 50s were the greatest in his lifetime. He was born in 1918. Full employment, a balanced federal budget of $150 billion, a nation brimming with confidence, where both parties were pro-American, and so forth. All of that changed irreversibly on Nov 22, 1963.

[huckfillary]

I was born in ‘53. My memories of the ‘50s are sketchy. But, my father told me often as I got older that the 50s were the greatest in his lifetime. He was born in 1918. Full employment, a balanced federal budget of $150 billion, a nation brimming with confidence, where both parties were pro-American, and so forth. All of that changed irreversibly on Nov 22, 1963.

[GenXteacher]

If I were writing a history of the US, I would put the high point of our civilization at 1962, with it in steep decline ever since.

[VAarea]

My younger brother was born within days of the Kennedy assassination (which I consider one of the first major cracks in the foundation of our nation). I call him “cliff baby”, born right at the edge of our great cliff of decline.

Being born in the early 1950s I’m thankful that my formative first dozen or so years fell in that earlier period, forever thankful I wasn’t born a day later.

[Fiji Hill]

All of that changed irreversibly on Nov 22, 1963.

Thanks to a Commie.

[Fiji Hill]

If I were writing a history of the US, I would put the high point of our civilization at 1962, with it in steep decline ever since.

I would place it on Thursday, January 19, 1961.

[familyop]

"...and as much as 80 percent of that Eisenhower-era tax revenue was spent on the military and national security, with entitlement and welfare spending kept to a small share of outlays."

That's how revenues should be spent. The author's yearning for socialism and more government control is obvious.

[Fiji Hill]

One group that was unhappy during the fifties was conservatives, who found themselves increasingly marginalized following the death of Sens. Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio) in 1953 and Pat McCarran (D-Nev.) in 1954. With the Wall Street/Country Club faction of the GOP (known as Me Toos then and RINOs today) now firmly in the saddle, the GOP steadily lost strength during the remainder of the decade, which culminated in the election of 1958 in which the GOP was blown out.

At the same time, however, conservatives were given hope by the rise of a new leader, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) who was elected in 1952 and bucked the Democrat landslide to be re-elected in 1958.

[Bikkuri]

I don’t like blonds....

[BobL]

“Americans talk about the postwar years — the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years — as though they were a kind of golden age. They weren’t”

The author is an IDIOT. I watched Happy Days for years, and it obviously was the BEST TIME this country ever had.

What a Dingbat.

[BobL]

After reading Thomas Sowell, I don’t think that I can ever look at the ‘Civil Rights Movement’ as it was constructed, as an improvement for black Americans. It looks more like a disaster, which stopped their progress dead in its tracks, and then set them back to a pre-industrial lifestyle.

[Gay State Conservative]

later

[central_va]

Only reciprocal trade protectionism can return American prosperity.

[Joe 6-pack]

"After reading Thomas Sowell, I don’t think that I can ever look at the ‘Civil Rights Movement’ as it was constructed, as an improvement for black Americans. It looks more like a disaster, which stopped their progress dead in its tracks, and then set them back to a pre-industrial lifestyle."

A fundamental building block of a free market economy is contract law. The free exchange of goods and services hinges on mutually agreed contracts be they formal mortgage agreements or the informal exchange of a dollar bill for a candy bar over the counter at a convenience store.

Long before our Constitution was written and our nation was founded, it was widely understood and accepted that a basic principle of a contractual agreement was that it was non-coercive and entered into without duress. Some civil rights legislation turned this long accepted principle on its head.

Speaking for myself, if I owned a rental property, I would be happy to rent to anybody regardless of race, creed, etc. provided that I had a good faith belief they would take decent care of the property and pay their rent on time. I'm not blind to the fact that racism and other biases exist, and most assuredly, there are others who may not feel that way, and may not want to (for whatever reason) rent to somebody because they are Catholic, Irish, oriental, black etc.

The fact that under certain non-discrimination laws, that property owner must rent to somebody they would not otherwise rent to of their own free will, IMHO, makes that a coercive (and therefore invalid) contract.

I truly believe a free market would clean this up. A property owner who would refuse to rent to a clean, responsible black family loses a good customer to a competitor, and may end up renting to white trash that falls into arrears and destroys the property. Further, a black entrepreneur who saw this type of discrimination in action would be free to specialize in establishing rentals for those who were discriminated against and would likely find a previously unfilled market niche.

An employer who refused to hire a superbly well qualified candidate simply because they were Irish may very well find themselves losing out to a competitor who had no problem hiring the candidate.

As it stands, there have been doubtless millions upon millions of contracts signed in the US that have been entered into unwillingly under the threat of coercive state and federal laws. IMHO, none of these are valid contracts and as such they only foster ill will between the parties of each contract, and further they suppress free market innovations that would have otherwise taken place.