A significant segment of Americans sees this nation in decline, if not free fall. Never has the United States been in such bad shape, they say, and it is getting worse.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I would ask today’s naysayers to identify a period in our recent history when the nation was in better shape - economically, socially or in any other way than now.

It certainly could not be any time between 1925 and 1950, a period of economic depression, war and its aftermath. I am 88 years old. I was born near the end of the 1920s and grew up in the Great Depression, when one-third of A...