I mostly agree with what Mike wrote.

We may be in a typical time between an industrial age and a post-industrial age.I'm generally optimistic about the impact on liberty, but it could be the other way.

Government spending being a significant chunk of GDP is not a good thing, but I think we can muddle along and definitely like this. I don't see a turning point.

Nope. The world is continuing as it always has. Life would have been better without the Gulf Wars, the Mortgage Meltdown, and Bush-Obama Bailouts. But, apparently, life ended without notice for over a million monarch butterflies. You cannot control the environment. You just make your best choices within it.

As people are not butterflies, we here believe that better ideas will make a better future. How attitudes are formed and changed is complex. I believe that it was Robert Heinlein who said that you cannot rationally argue someone out of a position that they were not rationally argued into in the first place. Thus, Objectivism in particular, and the works of Ayn Rand in general, belong to the young.

Go to the Ayn Rand Institute website and find their essay contests for schools. From middle school through college, the trend continues as it has since 1957. I often point out that many of those winners come from Catholic middle schools and high schools. Those kids are some pretty seriously independent minds. It's been going on for fifty years.

Yes, there was a Bronze Age Collapse. Yes, there were Huns, and Mongols, and Turks. … and hurricanes and earthquakes… But they don't happen every day and we get over it pretty quickly because the Dark Side of the Force is not more powerful, only quicker and easier.

In The Future and Its Enemies by Reason editor Virginia Postrel, as in The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, it was said cogently that those who expect and want the end of the world we know are those who are unsuccessful in it - which is fine: we are all limited - but more to the point, they blame Others for their failures. Progressives, liberals, the bankers, or maybe capitalists, conservatives, and bankers. (Bankers never catch a break: who likes bankers?)