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.
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.