ABSTRACT
For those who have always believed the free ride was mainly about poor people on welfare, or people who seek undeserved entitlements and don't want to work, it should be clear by now that everyone has been getting a free ride—the rich even more than the poor, and the big corporations even more than the individual household. All of America, and a growing share of the world at large, at least since the end of World War II, has had a free ride. Now it's coming to an end. For the millions in the shrunken middle, there will be a slowly enveloping and tragic sadness, as it finally registers that the great American myth of perpetual economic growth has been only that—a myth. People have been profoundly misled by the assumption that industrial mass production, because it employs technologies invented by higher mental skills, is inherently superior to the work of human hearts and hands.
