First of all, in case I wasn't clear, I was talking about the 1950s, not the 1850s.

Reagan and Bush didn't cause unions to crap out, the market system did. There are just too damn many people in the world who are willing to work hard for less money. That, and the fact that the old adversarial relationship between "the workers" and the "bosses" largely died a quiet death as management became more modernized, partially due to competition from overseas.

A lot of people still own little shops from which they earn a living. Maybe you should roll into town more often. Most businesses are small businesses. Frankly, I think more people work for small businesses now than did during the 1950s, when the cradle-to-grave job at a major corporation often seemed to be the rule.

And there's nothing wrong with Wal-Mart. People shop there because they want to, but what people really want seldom factors into a leftist's thinking. It's what they SHOULD want that matters. And people who work there do just fine, thank you. Or maybe you think Mom and Pop's Shoe Shoppe offered its employees benefits, health care, and competitive salaries.

If people don't have dinner with their families, it may be that they chose a long commute in order to live where they want to. But again, individual choice is pretty low on the social planning priority list. I work out of my garage. That was the result of some choices too, and I don't have the benefits some employees do.

There were pensions back then, and catastrophic health insurance, which was all most people needed. It wasn't as essential back then, because health care was still mostly market driven and reasonably priced. My mom's bill for my birth was one page long. It was for a couple of hundred bucks, including several days in the hospital, which was how they did it back then.]

Employers started providing health insurance as an attractor for employees during WWII when government restrictions prevented them from offering higher salaries.

And on and on... ;)

And you still haven't addressed the immense increase in the tax burden on American citizens, and the impact it had.

I'm astonished at how some people can reconstruct reality in their own image.