Every generation of American intellectuals has its pessimists who lament the country’s worsening moral malaise, real or imagined. What sets apart today’s “declinists” from yesterday’s is not an allegiance to a new morality but their shared faith in the power of statutory law to cure all our social ills.

James A. Montanye is a retired consulting economist in Falls Church, Virginia.
Bureaucracy and GovernmentGovernment and PoliticsPhilosophy and ReligionSocialism, Communism, and Collectivism
Other Independent Review articles by James A. Montanye
Summer 2018 Digital Revolutions in Public Finance
Winter 2015/16 Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others
Fall 2014 The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
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