https://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/07/gary-north/those-good-old-days/
By Gary North
The libertarian humorist P. J. O’Rourke says, “When you think of the good old days, think ‘dentistry.’”
The greatest invention of the modern world is anesthetics. Prior to 1844, in preparation for an operation, you drank booze until you passed out — hopefully. Then the physician — “sawbones,” he was called — got started hacking away.
Although you may not go under anesthetics more than once a decade, what would you pay on a desert island for the last can of ether when it was time for your operation? People will not give up access to anesthetics.
As for a familiar indispensable item in daily use, toilet paper comes to mind. That was invented in 1857, according to some Websites. The perforated roll came in 1867.
In other words, some very big breakthroughs came late in the history of civilization.
THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER, EXCEPT FOR. . . .
One item stands out on the list as too good to be true.
Today, things are far worse. Which one is it?
Go back and look over the list again.
Go on. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.
Stuck? Here is a hint:
“By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.”
Is it really this bad today? It really is. The good old days, educationally, really were good.
This was equally true in 1910. The good old days were better. Consider this:
“According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: ‘Last of the Mohicans’, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?”
Or this:
MCViewPoint 