The surge of optimism and post-materialist values in the decades following World War II was short-lived. Two recessions, 1973–1975 and 1981–1982, raised unemployment to levels not experienced since the Great Depression, generating insecurity among workers. Union membership fell as did wages as manufacturing suffered from cheap imports and the relocation of industries abroad. Stagflation (simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation) delegitimated Keynesian economics and President Ronald Reagan identified government—that which had dramatically improved the well-being of most Americans since the 1930s—to be the problem and in need of massive shrinking. Laissez-faire ideology resurged in the form of supply-side economics, guiding and legitimating public policies that generated an explosion in inequality that continues to the present. The earlier optimism had been crushed and replaced by widespread insecurity, stress, and pessimism, resulting for some in what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton term deaths of despair. This chapter concludes with the challenge of setting forth an alternative vision to the laissez-faire ideology that privileges the wealthy, one that serves the greater population by reducing inequality and insecurity while expanding the realm of freedom and democracy to the workplace.