Reddit reviews The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America
We found 29 Reddit comments about The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Lmao, sure thing guy...
> leading to mass suffering.
You are 100% delusional. You have a disease, and the only cure is for you to educate yourself. Since your ideas thus far are incorrect, I’d suggest starting with this book. Let me know when you’re finished and we can go from there.
I started out by writing one of those long, line-by-line response comments, but who wants to read that?
Instead, I'll try to get the heart of the subject. I'll start with a quote by arch-libertarian Murray Rothbard.
> It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
What I'm seeing in this post is a loud, vociferous opinion about the economics of libertarianism when you have clearly only had a surface-level encounter with the ideology. Heck, you seem to only have a surface-level acquaintance with your own ideology.
Some books for you to look at:
Note how these are available as free downloads. Most of us don't believe in "intellectual property," so that subject might be of interest to you in Against Intellectual Monopoly.
The short version is this: No, we're not out to get you. Yes, we see many of your sacred cows as expendable in the pursuit of human liberty. Yes, we've thought long and hard about this (for a couple hundred years actually), and No, this isn't just some scam to help the Koch brothers.
I'm not sure what part of your view I'm supposed to be changing here, but you need to know a lot more about your own position and the one you're attacking first, so enjoy the reading list.
By virtue of the fact that I'm on Reddit, you're obviously correct.
I recommend Losing Ground, Affirmative Action Around the World, and The Myth of the Robber Barons for an empirical, historical examination of what has caused poverty to decline in America, and what has caused it to increase.
> if she thinks that the railroad tracks were laid across the country without eminent domain seizure BY the government, she's crazy...
Some railroads were, in fact, laid across the country without eminent domain seizure by the government. Including one transcontinental line - the Great Northern - which grew slowly and organically, building each segment to profitability before extending it further rather than racing to cover as much territory as possible as some of the more heavily subsidized lines in the south did. Curiously enough, when hard times came in the Panic of 1893, the Great Northern was one of the few railways that avoided bankruptcy. Rand is thought to have based Taggart Transcontinental in part on this bit of largely-forgotten economic history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_%28U.S.%29
I recommend a book called The Myth of the Robber Barons; it covers the strategies followed by large industrialists of the time, arguing that those who gained market share via market competition were largely pro-consumer and those that took subsidies to compete - including some of the railroads some of the time - weren't. (Atlas actually does a decent job of illustrating the point.)
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493003036&sr=8-1&keywords=The+myth+of+the+robber+barons
Classical Liberalism is a founding principle of our nation. In American politics it goes back to Jefferson and Madison, and then Lincoln with the founding of the Republican Party. "Conservative" and "Right Wing" in the US is very different from everywhere else because the founding principles we are trying to preserve are classically liberal. Between the Civil War and Great Depression we had the great industrial revolution which was fueled by Republicans dominating national politics and enabling the great engine of capitalism to transform America and the world. Of course Leftists had their part in balancing the ill effects of that era, but there was nothing liberal about them. Many of their leaders were socialists and communists. Most conservatives will credit Woodrow Wilson as being one of the worst people responsible for the massive expansion of state power and erosion of individual liberty.
Leftist liberals like some freedoms but not all. Such as workers deserve many freedoms, even if they come at the expense or detriment of their employers' freedoms. True classically liberal Republicans will argue that both parties have freedoms and will be reluctant to interfere.
Somewhere in the last century the left stole the word "Liberal" from those who care about liberty. It's just like every lie they've propagated on the American people.
If you want your mind blown by just how much our education system and teaching of history has been shaped by the Left, check out The Myth of the Robber Barrons. It's a short book but it will have you questioning everything your high school history teachers taught you about the post civil war boom. You'll see some of the worst examples of crony capitalism and state collusion with names you may have revered, and stories of entrepreneurs struggling against the state.
Standard Oil was still in steep competition with the major Russian oil producer at the time. The oil wasn't as well refined, but it was dirt cheap. They don't teach that in school. Think I read that in Burt Folsom's Myth of the Robber Barons.
How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas DiLorenzo is a fast read that covers all of this well. The Myth of The Robber Barons by Burton Folsom is more in-depth.
Read The Myth of the Robber Barons and educate yourself. Standard Oil did as well as it did because of innovation, and it was in fierce competition with Russia, whose oil was easier to produce and better in every way.
And read the comment below concerning the Dutch East India company. The recorded history you're referring to has nothing to do with capitalism.
>and they tend to forgot about things like roads, street lights, stop signs, school zones, police, fire departments, etc.
Do you know there are places where these things are already provided by the private sector? There already are private police and security forces, private and volunteer fire departments, privately maintained roads, private courts of arbitration and so on... and I'm not referring to Somalia. I'm referring to places in the western world, here in the United States.
>just that I thought this was already tried and what ended up was the wild wild west and robber barons.
Give this and this a read some time. "I thoughts" don't mean much if you've only approached the issue from one perspective.
In America, the false narrative of the 19th century American "robber barrons" (such as Rockefeller) is frequently used as an excuse for bigger government and regulation. Do Australians point at those American robber barons as an excuse to implement the same crap domestically, or does Australia have its own version of the robber barons?
BTW, there were actual robber barons, as Ayn Rand pointed out, but they were the ones who used government to club competition. The wealthy industrialist who accomplished things w/o government interference were not robber barons. The Rockefeller family happens to include both b/c the Rockefellers were instrumental in the the formation of the Federal Reserve System. One of my favorite quotes on the Fed by former Fed Chairman Paul Volker: "[bailouts are] the most basic function of the Federal Reserve. It was why it was founded." And true that is.
I seem to remember George Reisman engaging with the chain store problem at length in his book "Capitalism" though I only used the arguments from it second-hand via Tom Woods.
That link is to a saved comment thread I partook of. The relevant bit is way down near the bottom of the page under the heading "FREE MARKET CARTELS?"
EDIT - I'll quote the most relevant bits below...
> The way I see it, this would very likely lead to a situation in which security companies collaborated to raise prices in order to make more profit.
Why do you see it that way? Which industries in which countries at which points in time look to you like cartels?
The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo in beverages and snacks are kings or queens of the hill. There are no competitors who even compare to these two giants for market share in their space. So why is there no love between them? No evidence has so far come to light of even the slightest hint of cartelisation.
Likewise in the case of The Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox in media.
Or we would have mentioned China Mobile, Vodafone and Bharti Airtel in mobile telecoms.
There is no evidence of cartelisation in any freely trading industry ever - even Standard Oil under Rockefeller doesn't qualify as a monopolist - therefore it won't happen.
In fact almost none of the so-called robber barons actually robbed anybody as Burton Folsom illuminates in his book The Myth of the Robber Barons & lectures.
For example Cornelius Vanderbilt actually defied (see 9m11s to 20m15s of the video) an existing, government-sanctioned monopoly in New Jersey/New York steamboat services and then a subsidised competitor from 1817 to 1850.
And so we move on to predatory pricing, baby. Tom DiLorenzo wrote a paper on US anti-trust laws for which he actually went and looked to see what the scary monopolists were up to in the 1880's and found nothing a neoclassical or Austrian would call monopoly in any of the 17 industries for which data were available. The data and findings are also included in a chapter of DiLorenzo's book.
On the same note DiLorenzo points out in this article that the only ones harmed in some way by the business practices of the so-called robber barons were their competitors, and it was those competitors who got the ball rolling on Anti-Trust laws by writing their congressman. He mentions one truly damning example of the impact of anti-trust regulation;
"In what is perhaps the best example of nonsensical double-talk in antitrust history, in 1944 Judge Learned Hand found Alcoa guilty of "monopolizing" the virgin ingot aluminum market by employing "superior skill and foresight" which the judge feared had "forestalled" competition by those businesses with less skill and foresight. He condemned Alcoa for being extremely adept at correctly anticipating market demand for its product and then supplying that demand, to the "exclusion" of its less efficient competitors."
And AnComs want more of this? Anyway.
To return to the Tom Woods lecture video, at 37m10s he gets onto predatory pricing in earnest and mentions that economist George Stigler calls it "embarrassing" to hear any economist say they believe in predatory pricing because nobody has been able to find a single solitary example in the real world.
Woods explains over several minutes - using George Reisman's work in Capitalism - that even a chain store does not gain financial advantage from predatory pricing over long periods and cannot raise prices after the competitors are gone. Any attempt to raise prices above that market rate creates incentives for newcomers to enter the industry again, and even at the pre-predatory market rate there will still be room for new competitors.
He also explains minimum resale price agreements between producers and retailers - Merck in pharma and WalMart in drug retail - and how they solve the problem of predatory pricing, plus how the US anti-trust law makes MRPA's illegal.
>The robber barons were able to amass gigantic fortunes when the government of the US was much smaller than it is today.
That's true, but what did they do that was bad? Rockefeller was the reason why poor people could light their homes for the first time ever. He reduced the price of kerosene by over 90%. He also made a lot of poor farmers rich, and saved the whales from extinction. Carnegie made everything cheaper by greatly reducing the price of steel. Vanderbilt broke government sponsored monopolies on ferries and ferried people for free - only making money off of concessions.
Another thing to note is that almost all of them came from poor families.
Read this book if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315
>The only reason the governments are a corrupting influence is because of corporations and wealthy individuals paying them to alter laws.
But they have to have the power in the first place. And they didn't have much regulatory power until the early 20th century. Before that we saw massive economic growth and an explosion in the standard of living of the poor.
>But it's very hard for government workers to become corrupt without influence from special interests who dissuade them from legislating and enforcing in the general public's best interest.
The Soviet Union was extremely corrupt, and there were no private businesses. Corporations themselves, on the other hand, have an incentive not to be wasteful and corrupt because their own money and investments are on the line.
>Corporations and wealthy individuals often create policies which run counter to the public interest.
Sure, and that is completely contrary to what I want. I want a government that doesn't have the power to create those policies.
>Therefore government becomes the only tool to fight corporate corruption.
This seems to contradict your previous statements. Government enables corporations to bribe then and create bad policies, but it is simultaneously the check against corporate power? Do you see the contradiction?
>we must remove the corrupting influence of campaign donations and lobbyists.
It isn't just those two things. Washington is a revolving door of sorts. Look up regulatory capture - that has nothing to do with either campaign donations or lobbying.
>the proper balance of government and free market in the interest of the general public and not merely the powerful elites.
It's my very strong opinion that free markets do not serve the interests of the powerful elite. That's why they lobby so strongly against it. (see: healthcare, telecom, oil, etc.)
Sorry that I couldn't respond sooner, I was pretty busy all yesterday. That being said, I have a couple objections to what you said.
>People lived in absolute grinding poverty during that period
Yes, they did. They also lived in poverty before that and before that and before that and so on. Poverty was never a new thing. Now during the 1800 and 1900s people saw ways out of poverty and that was working in factories.
I am going to assume that you are talking about the industrialization of the United States and the poor living conditions that these people had. Tell me, what sense would it make for people to move to cities from farms, poorhouses or even the streets if they did not think that they could have a better opportunity in the city? Factory owners did not force these laborers to the cities, these people went voluntarily. To quote Ludwig von Mises who says it better than I ever could:
“The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation."
> women couldn't vote, black people were second class citizens subject to terrorism from the Klan and corrupt public officials, Asians were excluded from entering the country. You call that a golden age?
All of those things that you listed were government regulations that were put on these people. I approve of none of those things. Yeah, it definitely sucked that these people were oppressed, but if the government was smaller or non-existent, none of those things would have happened.
>The entire progressive movement in American sprung to combat the human misery and excesses of the Robber Barons during that period.
No, it wasn't the progressive movement that dealt with human misery and allowed humans to work less, children not to work, etc. It was capitalism that allowed for all these things to happen.
Think about this for a second. Before the industrialization of America and other countries, no one thought that escaping poverty was possible. People worked long hours because they had to work long hours. Children worked because if they didn't, their family would starve. It wasn't the progressive movement that allowed us to no longer be oppressed by nature.
You can’t outlaw starvation by saying “Okay, no more children working and everyone now has a 40 hour work week.” You get time off and children have to stop working once laborers are earning enough money for the work that they are doing.
Look at the situation in Bangladesh. Child labor was outlawed and now look where the children are. They are now taking jobs as prostitutes because they have no other way to make money. Thomas DiLorenzo says:
"Those who deplore "child labor" and "sweatshops" fail to recognize or acknowledge that as deplorable as these conditions may seem by the standards of modern-day America, these people are much better off for having the opportunity to work in a higher paying factory. In many parts of today's world starvation is still the alternative to budding capitalism. To child laborers in parts of the world, the alternatives to "sweatshop labor" are malnutrition and starvation, child prostitution, and begging and stealing."
You also mention the Robber Barons and how they were awful capitalists. I’m going to suggest two books for you to read.
However, I can sum those two books up for you real quickly. The “Robber Barons” that you know from US History, were definitely not as awful as you think they were. Also, I’m getting all my information from How Capitalism Saved America in the seventh chapter called The Truth about the “Robber Barons”. Everything has citations in the book.
John D. Rockefeller, “Even though John D. Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil, had at one point 90% of the market share of oil, the company greatly improved the quality and availability of kerosene products while reducing the costs of them by about 80%.” - Burt Folsom. So apparently providing much need products for a cheap price is a bad thing.
He also never purchased insurance on his plants because he knew that they were incredibly safe. His kerosene products were so cheap that it ended up replacing whale oil which was used a whole lot in the late 1800s. He paid his employees significantly more than his competition and he also believed in rewarding his most innovated managers with bonuses and paid time off.
Rockefeller never had a monopoly on oil in fact by the time that government got involved and was “Hey you have too much of the market share”, free market capitalism and competition already did the work itself and Rockefeller’s market share was only at about 60%.
There is plenty more that you can read for yourself in those books, but I really hope this made you think and reconsider.
The "correct" ones, aka consensus history, is written by the winners. Who do you think won the battle between consumer and cartel? Apparently corporations are still in control despite Sherman... So that might explain your irrational fear of voluntarism and capitalism.
Fact of the matter is, the only people who suffered from the rise of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Hill etc. were competitors. Consumers benefited greatly from revolutionary vertical integration techniques, and it was the industry competitors that lobbied congress for a response to these extremely fair and affordable businesses taking over. Even at the point of the anti-trust laws the big companies were losing market share to competitors that were catching on, so to call them monopolies is disingenous. It's like saying Microsoft was a monopoly in the late 90s.
The Myth of Robber Barons
This book makes the important distinction between market entrepreneur and political entrepreneur. A "monopoly" that arises through market forces, aka natural monopoly, is a GOOD thing. Monopolies that arise through political forces aren't.
I'd like for you to explain why you think more choices at a higher cost and lower quality is an improvement over fewer choices with higher quality, thanks.
Non-referral link for the lazy
>You're continuing to demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of net neutrality. Companies offer "slow cable" and "fast cable" all the time already.
Then there is no issue. Because that was precisely what the "issue" was all about. Google might have a faster connection with its servers if they paid more.
And I have read the wiki. It is full of misinformation, and I guess you expected me to ignore that there are lots of arguments against it - most of which I have made here.
>Your argument was that Std wasn't a monopoly because of Gulf Oil. That argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you look at the timeline.
Before Gulf Oil, there were other competitors. It wasn't a monopoly because monopolies force others to not be able to compete on any level. And their market share grew at the same time Standard Oil discovered and produced scores of byproducts, including candle wax, soap, petroleum jelly, tars, and lubricating oils.
>I think you need to understand that these rates were given on all Standard shipments regardless of size.
Something tells me Standard shipments were generally pretty large. If they never shipped small quantities, and they didn't, as they had so much market share, then "all shipments" getting discounts is not even an issue.
>Originally the rail companies were even giving Standard refunds when they shipped competitors oil.
Evidence? Because from what I have seen, this was not the case. In fact, even from sources unfriendly to Rockefeller, it is claimed that he only got rebates "of varying amounts" on the "greater part" of his shipments. Sounds like bulk pricing rebates to me.
I suggest you take a look at this book.
You could also view this lecture.
There is historic evidence that free market economic policy, which paul supports, does benefit the average consumer. You can search for this yourself. I recommend The Myth of the Robber Baron's.
Also, Libertarians are not supported by big bankers, this is one of the reasons I vote for them.
Read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
The Myth of the Robber Barons
"Robber Barons", I see you paid attention to everything they told you in government school without any of that skepticism you hold so dear.
James J. Hill was no "robber baron" and built the Northern Transcontinental Railroad without a dime of public money. Since he was paying out of his own pocket, his route was a direct route with sturdy bridges and tunnels unlike the government-financed Transcontinental which was full of wide winding curves to increase its mileage (since they were paid per-mile) and shoddily built bridges which ended up costing many people their lives. His railroad was the only one to never go bankrupt and is also the only original transcontinental route which was never abandoned, in fact it remains as one of the busiest rail routes in the United States.
Or not.
Repeating your assumption is not an argument.
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
This is a good read:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
More reading: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
//EDIT:
I forgot to mention, we have stats on how many US workers are minimum (or below) wage earners: http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2010.htm 2.5 million people are already working below minimum wage (I'm not sure how that happens... or how the BLS collects that data) and 1.8 million work at minimum wage. The 1.8 million would be directly at risk of having lower wages. (There's also complexity because some states have higher minimum wages than the federal minimum wage... but I'm ignoring that complexity for now.)
(or maybe the book is based on the speech?)
If there is a monopoly within a single industry, and the monopoly decides to force wages down, there will still be a problem. Because the workers in that industry have multiple options-- they can leave that industry! Unskilled labor is exactly that-- unskilled, and a easily transferrable among all the unskilled jobs. The skill in skilled jobs are often transferable. Let's say that a boat-building monopoly appear: the welders could leave and do welding in other kinds of construction. The engineers could leave and work at Boeing. The administrators could leave and administrate anything else. Switching industries might harm the wages of some of the people who had industry-specific knowledge, but the industry-specific knowledge helps the people with high education already. I.E. the highly skilled workers would lose more value by leaving the industry than the unskilled workers would.
The monopolist would lose employees and quickly run into problems providing good enough service. If this is a market-based monopoly, then competitors (likely founded from the discouraged & underpaid workers who quit in protest of pay cuts) would come in, and the monopoly would be gone. If the monopoly is politically based, then the monopoly would simply continue to provide bad service and potentially become a burden to the government.
https://mises.org/library/do-antitrust-laws-preserve-competition
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
>This is the mother of all ignorant, revisionist history, craziness I have ever read.
That's not an argument. Try not to believe everything you were taught in public school history class.
You may actually learn something new
This is not a failing of "capitalism", or the free market.
Cartels have been historically broken by competitors or even betrayal inside of the cartel when a member decides to make more money at the expense of the cartel who are intentionally marketing an inferior product, by selling the superior one.
"Greed" in fact destroys cartels, it does not sustain them. The only cartels and monopolies that survive are those that are defended from free market forces by government interference through "regulation" and corporate welfare.
Meh, this is going to be downvoted to oblivion. It's much easier to say "Capitalism bad cuz greed." then it is to actually understand how free market economies work.
For the few actually interested in the truth and not just bashing the "capitalism" boogeyman;
Myth of the Robber Barons by Burton W. Fulsom
>The theory of natural monopoly is also ahistorical. There is no evidence of the "natural-monopoly" story ever having been carried out — of one producer achieving lower long-run average total costs than everyone else in the industry and thereby establishing a permanent monopoly. As discussed below, in many of the so-called public-utility industries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were often literally dozens of competitors.
The Myth of Natural Monopoly
>This would only be a waste if you push longevity ahead of technological improvement. Individual consumers are free to do that, but we have no basis for declaring this value set as fixed and unchanging. We do not live, nor do we wish to live, in a world that is static, where development never occurs, where what exists has always existed and always will.
In Praise of Shoddy Products
>But what about the executives who will cut corners, even to the point of breaking the law, to expand their own salaries and power? Here the Chicken Littles are correct about the problem, but they're wrong about the solution.
The Problem of Corporate Greed