2) The oligarchs literally stole money from the State. The robber barons, although accused of using unscrupulous methods, did not.
That’s a bold claim that I don’t believe holds up. Even setting aside specifically illegal business practices (bribery, violence, fraud) - the robber baron industrialists exploited the rules of capitalism to concentrate wealth and enrich themselves on the backs of their workers and society. They got ludicrously rich, and everybody else got... what? Less competition in the oil industry? In that sense they robbed us all.
Even if you believe that capitalism is the right system for the world, you have to see extreme concentration of wealth as a problem. Put simply, what is better for society: 1 billionaire, or 1,000 millionaires? I believe that it’s pretty clearly the latter.
Also, the whole “robber baron” thing is distorted: https://fee.org/articles/how-the-myth-of-the-robber-barons-b.... By and large they became wealthy because they provided an incredibly valuable new service that catalyzed vast amounts of new economic activity. I suspect 50 or 100 years from now, you’ll read similar revisionist histories about the dawn of the Internet age. The proponents of central planning are already working on it.
But if we set illegal business practices aside, I still think it’s bold to say the massively wealthy industrialists didn’t do anything wrong because of the case i made in my comment (in short: the inherent immorality of large wealth accumulation).
> By and large they became wealthy because they provided an incredibly valuable new service that catalyzed vast amounts of new economic activity.
What was the new and valuable service consolidating the US oil industry provided? There were oil companies, that was already happening... what value was added by rolling it all into one ball? If you believe in capitalism you would agree that competition is good for an industry, so how is the thing that made rockafeller so rich (consolidation) good for anyone but him?
And i already believe that a lot of what has happened in the last 10-15 years of the internet age is actively bad for our society, no central planning needed - just open eyes.
> The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University
In what world is his being jewish relevant to the article, except to dog-whistle anti-semetic protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion conspiracy bs? Disgusting.
I'm not talking about Bezos and Zuckerberg. I'm talking about how industrialists on the west got their start in the "good ole times".
Point being that post-Communist countries elites used the same methods that early western capitalism used, to bootstrap themselves into capitalism...
>2) The oligarchs literally stole money from the State. The robber barons, although accused of using unscrupulous methods, did not.
The oligarchs didn't have to have "stole money from the state" (not directly at least). Rather, much like western capitalists of yore and of modern day, they benefited from having "friends" in the state, legislators in their pockets, etc, to secure rents and monopolies, special deals, thwart competition, etc.