Best Columns: Decadent debt, iPhone prey

Our U.S. founding fathers

The age of financial decadence

Our U.S. founding fathers “built a moral structure around money,” says David Brooks in The New York Times, and “for centuries” we prospered by remaining “industrious, ambitious, and frugal.” Well, no more. Much of that virtue “has been shredded” over the past 30 years, resulting in a destructive “explosion of debt” and “stark financial polarization” between “the investor class” and “the lottery class.” There are a number of agents responsible for this “financial decadence”—state lotteries, payday lenders, credit card companies—and several solutions. The most important thing, though, is to follow Ben Franklin’s lead and re-embrace the “bourgeois virtues” of temperance and thrift.

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