The Road to the Ox Carts

This book contains a collection of hard hitting, short essays on topics of national interest. Joe Launie combines the knowledge and understanding of a university research scholar with the investigative skills of a forensic examiner in these unique essays. The essays are easy to read. Joe Launie's writing style crackles with humor, even when discussing pensions, college tuition financing and forest fire safety.

A Professor Emeritus at CSUN in business, Joe Launie was in the classroom from 1965 to 2000 explaining complex topics to university undergraduates and graduate students. The essays in this book examine political issues in a fashion that everyone can understand, even jurors and attorneys.

While some commentators struggle to define the middle class, these essays display a fundamental understanding of the economic structure of American Society. The factors that led to a series of boom years for the middle class after World War II are discussed together with the shifts in the American business world that have led us to where we are.

Joe Launie identifies pressures threatening the very fabric of society that are created when the ladders with which bright, hardworking individuals can climb from the lowest socio-economic circumstances to the highest are greatly reduced in number. Virtually free college education with no student loans and high paying manufacturing jobs provided means of escaping poverty, reducing socio-economic tensions. Recent shifts in the American business community have reduced these safety valves drastically. Similar situations in other societies have produced violent revolutions during which some upper class heads rolled. Joe Launie suggests changes in areas such as college student loans and the return to real pensions that can lead the middle class back to where we were.

-- Joseph J Launie, PhD, CPCU, FACFE