The solution to the Robber Barons was ...what?

Were the "people" to blame then?

I think not. Nor does history.

What America needs is to place the blame squarely where it belongs. It isn't on the people who were duped into mortgages "they couldn''t afford." SUVs were sold on SAFETY, not gas mileage. Sorry, but when medical and energy expenses go up by 100s of percents, that's not anything jane and joe sixpack are responsible for, or could be expected to plan for. You're problem seems to be that you've never wanted for anything. What you need is a year spent broke in any inner city in America to open your eyes and inform your barren heart. Pity there isn't instant Karma.

Someone pointed out that you were naive. I think you're just an ignorant, greedy capitalist, the kind Marx ridiculed.

What is needed is balance, and that isn't about your incessant preaching to show that you have any idea of what that entails.

I agree with ClearThinker on this one, to the extent that:

Some people seem to be born with a sense of personal responsibility. Some people have to be taught it but learn early. Some of us struggle for years, externalizing blame but then, however late, finally face the music and see, as ClearThinker suggested, that the enemy is within. And some people just never get it at all.

The choice to drug children -- with Ritalin or anti-depressants or whatever -- is an issue of personal parental responsibilty. As is the decision to dope ourselves with a cornucopia of anti-depressants, etc..

Why? Because no lobby in Washington, no advertising agency in NYC , nor even any school administrator or significant other is making anyone ingest these drugs.

Does this mean that no one should take them? Of course not. Yes, there are some children who benefit from them, because they have been diagnosed by someone without a vested interest -- after laborious testing of both mental and physical characteristics -- as having one of a handfull of mental conditions that can be helped with pharmaceuticals. And, yes, there are some adults who benefit from taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications (as well as anti-psychotic drugs) because they, too, have a carefully diagnosed condition that can be helped by pharmaceuticals.

But that is a very different scenario from the wholesale doping of children and adults that has gone on for the past fifteen to twenty years.

Garth Wood, a prominent British psychiatrist, wrote a book on this subject that is compelling -- in which he divides five diagnoses for which there can be little management without drugs, from all the rest, that benefit more from various kinds of therapy.

In regard to the latter: parents are responsible for the well-being of their children -- not the other way round. Children, in vast numbers, should not be given drugs just because they are more docile or manageable while taking them. This responsibility also applies to teachers and school administrators, although they have our heartfelt sympathy. (I should know, as I currently teach adolescents of alleged privilege who have behavioral problems, in addition to foreign students who wonder on what planet they have landed.)

As to what we do to ourselves, as adults: how many of us have taken Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc., etc., only to discover that either they made us feel worse, over time, or became a prop that substantiated a rationale for not dealing with the realities that confronted us?

As to affecting our children, negatively, with consumerism: I am guilty as charged. Did I live beyond my means to place my son in an advantageous school district? Yes, rationalizing all the way. Did I later send him to a private school (as I had been sent on an entirely different parental budget ) so that he might get a boost into a great college? Yes, I did. Did I then encourage, and pay for, trips abroad to "broaden" his horizons? Yes, I did.

And what, in the end, did I teach him? Here's the surprise:

Not an enduring sense of entitlement, as this child of mine was, in spite of me, no fool. Rather, while he sincerely thanked me for the advantages I provided, he legitimately pointed out that I was, in terms of personal responsibility for my own welfare, an abysmal money and asset manager. And that what I had done I had done, in part, from ego. Touche.

Hard to argue with what is true. So let's stop doping, and enabling, our children.