America's Money Machine

258 PART III/DEBACLE OF AN IDEA
index ofprices, and in any case the effect is that ofputting the cart before
the horse.
More insidious, however, because less visible in statistics, is the political
unrest and moral decay that is served ifnot promoted by depreciating
money. Beginning in the 1960's, as many observers have noted, there
occurred a widespread dissatisfaction with not only government-which
may have been the result ofinvolvement in an unpopular war-but with
"establishments" unrelated to politics-from school to church, including
conventions ofbehavior and dress. Young people took to living together
without benefit of clerk or clergy; homosexuality emerged from the
closet, like· vermin from an upturned plank, and became a political influence;
the use of narcotics and drug stimulants became open and even
fashionable. Accompanying these happenings was an enormous increase
in crime-bank robberies, murder, rape and sodomy, masochism, torture,
child abuse.
Endemic also was the declining esprit and morale of government functionaries:
teachers, police, firemen, upon whom the security of society
rests, no longer hesitated to raise demands and enforce them by strikes.
Governments, straitened for funds, now regarded gambling more leniently
and state after state established official lotteries and encouraged
their citizens to gamble. "You Got to Play to Win" was the plea that
federal bureaucrats living in nearby Maryland found beaming at them
from billboards and posters, a subtle but demoralizing-influence on their
official rectitude. In the stock market, the big speculation was no longer
shares but commodity futures and options to buy shares-forms ofspeculation
that put the little fellow in the game-while the less sophisticated
in finance found opportunity at the race track under an official betting
system. The price of race horses rose to fantastic figures. "It's getting so
a modest owner like myself can't afford to buy a horse by himself anymore,"
the New York Times quoted the head of a large newspaper chain
and owner ofa dozen race horses. And well he might complain when one
filly at a 1979 sale in Lexington, Kentucky, sold for $1.4 million. 6
Probably no more descriptive ofthe general state ofaffairs in the ninth
decade of the century, or prophetic of the future, is the comment of a
leading track operator, reported in the Times: "I have a recurring dream,"
saidJohn Finney, who managed the Saratoga sales, "that I am auctioning
tulip bulbs"-a reference to the seventeenth century tulip mania in Holland.