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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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It’s not a “bold claim” to say that something that may or may not be undesirable (wealth concentration) is different than something that has been illegal under our laws going back to Biblical times (stealing).

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.

I think it’s a bold claim because although nobody is saying john d rockafeller broke into a bank and stole money, he has certainly been accused of corrupt (illegal) business practices.

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.

Also an aside: I started reading that article... I was giving it a fair shake (tho generally finding it unconvincing), until I encountered this sentence:

> 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.

FEE is quite biased.

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