. . . back when there were more jobs with bennies and more job security all around; say 1946-1979 (give or take) . . .

More for whom? Not for women. Or for Black men. Or immigrants.

That said, I can give you half of what you are asking for: I do not think that the 1980s represented any kind of significant net progress towards freed markets. And the myth of the “Reagan Revolution” is one of the most idiotic myths in the vulgar libertarian / small-government conservative compendium. Of course there are some things that got freer, and other things that got less free (as always happens when policies change), but state control and capitalist domination remained constant. On net, Reagan’s policies, and the Clintonian neoliberalism that followed it, represented a shift in the strategy of state-capitalist control, not a rollback — a shift towards multibillion dollar bail-outs rather than ex ante controls, towards subsidized multinational trade rather than tariff-protected domestic industry, towards privately-owned government-protected monopolies rather than direct nationalization, and all with a heavy dose of tax hikes (*), police statism, mass incarceration and confrontational hyper-militarism. So while I am a lot less fond of 1946-1979 than you seem to be, I hardly see 1980-present as a noticeable improvement over it.

(* Reagan’s big hike of FICA taxes was one of the biggest tax increases in American history. He is remembered as a tax-cutter because political commentators only give a shit about what happens to millionaires.)