I’m not sure this idyllic West ever actually existed, or if it did, that it wasn’t inherently transient. (Genuinely not sure, not trying to make an unequivocal

I’m not sure this idyllic West ever actually existed, or if it did, that it wasn’t inherently transient. (Genuinely not sure, not trying to make an unequivocal disagreement sound more palatable.) As in, the spirit of entrepreneurship and personal liberty did exist and wonderful things were built, but the most likely life for someone born in the advanced part of Western Europe or the US between say 1830 and 1930 seems to have been to slave away at a single factory for the entirety of your life, hardly ever encountering any money fit for general circulation, living in housing hardly worth the name amidst typhus and tuberculosis. “Social democracy” seems to entail a creeping illiberalism, and I’m not sure what we admire was anything but a brief period after the start of the former but before the onset of the latter. Yet it also solved a real problem and, indeed, is the best currently-known solution to it. Am I ever unhappy about that.