Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

2-11-2009

SSRN Discipline

HIST Subject Matter eJournals; Legal Scholarship Network; PSN Subject Matter eJournals; *Humanities - Forthcoming Areas; Political Theory eJournals; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; Humanities Network; History; Political Science Network

Abstract

This article argues that our times characterized as they are by dreams of vast wealth environmental destruction and growing social inequality resemble nothing so much as earlier getrichquick periods like the Gilded Age and the California gold rush I put forward a number of parallels between those earlier periods and now and suggest that the current fever is likely to end soon This will come as a relief to those of you who like me deplore the regressive social policies bellicose foreign relations and coarsening of public taste that we have been living througheven if some of our more libertarian friends found the times invigorating

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