This book, a polemical response to the dystopian direction that politics and economics have taken in the United States, is a combination of literary criticism and economic theory. It draws on the Latin poem Psychomachia by Prudentius, a citizen of the Roman Empire who lived through the last half of the fourth century into the beginning of the fifth, and on the 1959 groundbreaking graduate text on Public Finance by Richard Musgrave, which comes closest to infusing the present polemicist with the economic equivalent of what Prudentius called "Worship-of-the-Old-Gods." Kohn's "Old-Gods" are Allocative-Efficiency, Distributional-Equity, Inheritance-Taxation, Progressive-Tax-Rates, Paying-Down-the-Debt-When-the-Economy-Heats, Employment-Stabilization, and Optimal-Debt.