I think that's a very rosy view of the olden days.

The rich have always had disproportionate power, but historically there was a lot more top-down violence. When the US started out, it was generally only land-owning white men who could vote, a pretty small proportion of "the people". It took decades past your "200 years ago" to get a vote just for the minority of people who were white men, and it was a very bumpy process. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion

It wasn't until about 100 years ago that a majority of "the people" could even vote, and it was only 50 years ago that saw voting and economic rights applied reasonably equally to a majority of "the people".

Or we could look at actual attempts at "the people" having a modicum of power: labor organizing. The US has a rich history of anti-labor violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

I am happy to complain about what's going on today. But as bad as, say, Amazon is about union organizing, we shouldn't pretend that it's (yet) as bad as it was for most of America's history. And part of what makes today better is a strong-enough set of governments to push back against corporate malfeasance. As the police in this story clearly did.

Um, such actions were very very rare 200+ years ago. If you look at history from the lens of daily life in a given location, you will see that horrible behavior by the people in power would go on for lifetimes. Not only without without punishment or retribution, but sometimes celebrated and extolled. Often completely in the open. Typically, revolts only happened after things got really bad (as in lots of people murdered or starving bad). Even then, the vast majority of revolts ended up with lots of dead commoners and the same people in power.

Until very recently, the idea that those with power could not use that power to extract whatever they could from those without power was laughable. And the shit that the common folks had to deal with hundreds of years ago makes the worse harassment of today seem completely benign. Hell, mass murder to make a few bits of extra gold was common. And no one really batted an eye. Sometimes society not only condoned it but celebrated it.

Not to say that harassment today should be ignored. But harkening back to the good old days that never were is not, IMO, the way forward.

You seem unaware of the history around the Pinkertons.

Short story is that this was a private agency that openly offered services like the ones performed by the Ebay contractors, all the way to the point of directed murder, and did across decades, within living memory.

Nowadays, such services are offered mainly in war zones, by companies like what used to be called Blackwater, later Xi, run by Erik Prince, brother of Betsy de Vos. So there is still a market served, just a bit more circumspectly. But nobody who hires them goes to jail, and they don't either.

The wealthy and powerful like to keep their heads, and have devised complex systems of liability laundering and misdirection to ensure that the general public never get mad enough at the right people to actually start chopping off heads again. In a democratic republic, politicians are ostensibly in charge but in reality are beholden to corporate interests; corporations which in turn serve to hide more degrees of indirection between the powerful and their whims. When something goes wrong and the public gets enraged, by design it is never obvious who's head they should be after. Layers upon layers of fall men and patsies soak up the anger, tanking the outrage, long before the mob makes it to the necks that would actually make a difference.