[RJR_fan]

When I was a lad, the skies over the Ohio Valley were filled with multi=colored plumes of smoke. We enjoyed spectacular sunsets. On one night of insomnia, I ascended the hill behind our house, and saw the red glow where the steel mill dumped slag into the river to cool.

"The air is as pure as the air above the Arctic. But you don't know how much longer you'll want to go on breathing it," Ayn Rand wrote in The Anti-Industrial Revolution, a collection of essays. The blue-collar industrial milieu had a vigor, a joy, a hopefulness. Immigrants were welcomed, and assimiliated through the medium of "Polock jokes." (My maternal grandparents were immigrants from Easter Europe.) That world is gone, and progress has been a mixed blessing.

[Publius]

We have gone from a nation that made money by "making things" to a nation that makes money by shuffling paper assets from one pile to another.

That can't be good.