it always comes down to money...

never about what's right...

Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control-a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.

And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each one of us has a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: "inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life."

The quote comes directly from Paul Starr....
For America's Sake, By Bill Moyers, The Nation, 22 January 2007 Issue by way of truthout.org

Originally in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson based the phrase "...life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..." on the thoughts of John Locke:

The phrase is based on the writings of John Locke, who expressed a similar concept of "life, liberty, and estate (or property)". While Locke said that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions", Adam Smith coined the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property". The expression "pursuit of happiness" was coined by Dr. Samuel Johnson in his 1759 novel Rasselas.
Written by Thomas Jefferson, the words in the Declaration were a departure from the orthodoxy of Locke and Smith. Since Jefferson viewed the right to property, a concept tied to feudalism and such, as being potentially antithetical to liberty, he replaced the right to property with the right to the pursuit of happiness (Langguth).
WikepediA

Jefferson seems to have had the prescient forsight of what property/money could do to liberty. Combine this with President Eisenhower warning 185 years later about the military-industrial complex, the lessons unlearned from the Vietnam debacle and the Iraq/Halliburton civil war and what has history taught us?

A lot!

Are we learning from it? A good question.

Can we reverse it? Before the robber barons and gilded age.

Would we be going backward or forward? Depends on one's impression.

One final question - do we want to?

I want to...

do you?

just asking...