How did we get away from self-reliance?

There has been much discussion about how America has become a nation of “takers,” and not enough about “givers.”

Jacques Barzun, the distinguished Columbia University philosopher and historian, wrote that “ whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

In his book Glory of Their Times, Lawrence S. Ritter wrote: “Here, illustrated in microcosm, is the exuberance and unbounded optimism of a nation confident of its ability to shape the future to its will and mould its own destiny.

“In the days of Teddy Roosevelt, a man's fate was seen as his own doing, and individual initiative and hard work were viewed as the pathways to success. At that time the words welfare state, corporate image and organization man were not even part of the language. So it was in baseball as in America at large.”

Can we ever return to that mentality?