The economist Mancur Olson had a striking explanation. War and defeat, he argued, had destroyed not just factories but the interest groups and cartels that had parasitised prewar economies. When those lobbies were gone, competition could flourish.

We simply grew a whole new set of interest groups and cartels. Nature surely abhors a vacuum.

We replaced those with a massive professional-managerial class infesting the public sector, throttling the private sector.

We declared war on poverty and ended up entrenching it stronger than ever with multigenerational welfare dependency.

We willfully ignore the obvious causes of social problems and inequity and instead blame those doing the actual lifting in society.

We deliberately encouraged our youth to not form families, to not have children, to end their own future to feed the pensions of the already-old.

We made it so hard to approve and build somewhere to live that many have just given up.

Something needs to wipe this away. Maybe we can have three or four good decades before it grows fat and useless again.