Back in the day

I want to live back in the "old days".

What are the old days?  I suppose that phrase means different things to different people, but I mean the 1940's-1950's.  This was the day when a man's word meant more than the $100 deposit on a cell phone.

I just got done watching an episode of Law and Order SVU that indirectly dealt with a few old thieves and their enemies.  These kind of people fascinate me.  In modern portrayals (based off of descriptions and writings about the actual people I suppose) all of these men seem to be model citizens--never missing a child's event, attending church, donating to charities, working a "blue collar" job.  However, their actual lives are filled with deceit, danger, and death.

Some of these men were even more powerful than the police.  I don't mean to say that this notion of being "above the law" is a good thing, but the men that took that title were some of the most powerful men in the country.  The police wouldn't touch them and as long as no one got in their way, the general public had no idea what was going on.

The thing that makes me want to live in this time period is the fact that this time period is (aside from WW2) one of the more profitable times in US History.  Is this because these men used their power--moral or not--to "stimulate" the economy more than the government could ever do?  It would make sense to think that way.  The government has recently shown that certain corporations are too big to fail, so why not have people above the government that say this town, state, or country is too big to fail?  Now, I'm not saying we need to go back to the mobster feel of the big cities of the United States because that's not realistic--and in fact we're still in that era, the "mobsters" are just drug dealers now.  But, maybe if people decided that this country was too big to fail, the government wouldn't have to.