[T]he solution was liberalism: it had rescued the nation from the mindless boom-and-bust cycle of laissez-faire; it had defeated fascism; and it was then, in 1965, delivering one of the greatest periods of prosperity in history. In that year, American GNP grew by 6.5 percent—in these glory days of the billionaire it barely gets over 2 percent—in line with the official, stated goal of American economic policy: "a growing abundance, widely shared." Taxes were high, and the richest man in the world was the oil baron J. Paul Getty, worth between two and four billion dollars and fond of grousing about how tough it was to be rich in an era when even the middle-class man had access to what had once been the exclusive privileges of great wealth.
Thomas Frank
