Oil prices are at record highs, and the dollar is plummeting. Foreigners are buying out leading U.S. business assets

That '70s Show from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Joel Kotkin, always thoughtful and provocative, does a nice job in today's Washington Post advising us denizens of the first decade of the 21st century not to take our fears too seriously. Here are his opening paragraphs:

The country is in a funk. Oil prices are at record highs, and the dollar is plummeting. Foreigners are buying out leading U.S. business assets. Environmentalists say the world is headed toward an ecological crackup of biblical proportions.

Today's headlines? Well, yes. But for those of us old enough to remember, they could just as easily be bulletins from one of the grimmest decades in recent U.S. history: the '70s. That decade, when all the promise of the 1960s fizzled into disappointment, holds up a mirror to our contemporary pessimism. Then as now, Americans felt uncertain about the present and insecure about the future. But we found a way out of the gloom -- and if that decade is our guide, we're likely to do it again.

I came of age in the 1970s, and I agree with Kotkin.