Posted on: July 8, 2009 at 3:52 pm

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The Nanny Nation
Dwyer Gunn
NYT Freakonomics Blog

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/the-nanny-nation/

Once upon a time, America was a wild, unsettled country. Enterprising men and women eager for land of their own literally ran for it. They spent their lives working from dawn until dusk on lonely homesteads to build a better life for themselves and their children.

The distance between survival and total failure was small, and families behaved accordingly — protecting against risk with great caution.

Barry Ritholtz, in his new book Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy writes, “The iconic image is the American cowboy. You can picture him on a cattle drive, wearily watching over his herd. All he needed to get by were his wits, his horse — and his trusty Winchester.”

Americans are proud of this heritage, proud of being a country of “determined, self-reliant individuals” where hard work, not government handouts or family connections, promised a shiny future. Ritholtz’