Robber Baron Quotes

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

I steal from the rich to give to myself.

Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.

It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies.

The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day!

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

Kaldar almost never stops and thinks about the consequences of his actions. Something is fun or not fun, and my brother’s fun often lands him in interesting places such as jails or castles belonging to California robber barons. Where other people see certain death, my brother sees an opportunity for a hilarious, thrilling adventure. But when I got the tattoo, Kaldar warned me that marrying her was a bad idea.

Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.

• Reality is a curious thing. Truth is not as solid and universal as any of us would like it to be; selfishness guides perception, and perception invites justification. The physical image in the mirror, if not pleasing, can be altered by the mere brush of fingers through hair. And so it is true that we can manipulate our own reality. We can persuade, even deceive. We can make others view us in dishonest ways. We can hide selfishness with charity, make a craving for acceptance into magnanimity, and amplify our smile to coerce a hesitant lover. The world is illusion, and often delusion, as victors write the histories and the children who die quietly under the stamp of a triumphant army never really existed. The robber baron becomes philanthropist in the final analysis, by bequeathing only that for which he had no more use. The king who sends young men and women to die becomes beneficent with the kiss of a baby. Every problem becomes a problem of perception to those who understand that reality, in reality, is what you make reality to be. This is the way of the world, but it is not the only way.

Honey, it isn’t democracy that runs this country. Capitalism rules. It does no good to reason with the capitalists or their politicians. This is a class war. We have to stir up the American people, the lower class. Some of the better-off lower class do show some sympathy for us when they’re smacked with the facts. And when they voice themselves collectively, good things happen.” — Mother Jones

That’s got to stop,” says I. “The idea of any blood-thirsty pirate (Mexican President Diaz) sitting on a throne and reaching across the border to tromp on our Constitution makes my blood boil.” — Mother Jones

Liberals are willing to believe that these "robber barons" will fix prices, rig markets, establish monopolies, buy politicians, exploit employees and fire them the day before they are eligible for pensions, but they absolutely will not believe that these same men would want to rule the world or would use Communism as the striking edge of their conspiracy. When one discusses the machinations of these men, Liberals usually respond by saying, "But don't you think they mean well?

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

What do you see out there?” I ask. “Pittsburgh,” he replies. Now I laugh. “No, young man. What you see is hell with the lid taken off.” — Mother Jones

War is like a vacuum cleaner that sucks tax dollars out of your pocket and funnels the money directly into the pockets of the robber barons who own the weapons factories.

True choice requires that a person have the ability to choose an option and not be prevented from choosing it by any external force, meaning that a system tending too far toward either extreme will limit People’s opportunities. Also, both extremes can produce additional problems in practice. Aside from the fact that a lack of “freedom to” can lead to privation, suffering, and death for those who can’t provide for themselves, it can also lead to a de facto plutocracy. The extremely wealthy can come to wield disproportionate power, enabling them to avoid punishment for illegal practices or to change the law itself in ways that perpetuate their advantages at the cost of others, a charge often levied against the “robber baron” industrialists of the late nineteenth century. A lack of “freedom from,” on the other hand, can encourage people to do less work than they’re capable of since they know their needs will be met, and it may stifle innovation and entrepreneurship because people receive few or no additional material benefits for exerting additional effort. Moreover, a government must have extensive power over its people to implement such a system, and as can be seen in the actions of the majority of communist governments in the past, power corrupts.

One of the indisputable charms of the Metropolitan Museum is that the admission of twenty dollars is “recommended.” The very notion of a recommended fee is so perfectly aristocratic. For to set a definitive price on access to the riches of the world’s cultures after the robber barons had gone to such trouble to pillage them on our behalf would simply have been tacky.

The American Constitution was carefully rigged by the noteholders, land speculators, rum runners, and slave holders who were the Founding Fathers, so that it would be next to impossible for upstart dirt farmers and indebted masses to challenge the various forms of private property held by these well read robber barons. Through this Constitution, the over-privileged attempted to rule certain topics out of order for proper political discussion. To bring these topics up in polite conversation was to invite snide invective, charges of personal instability, or financial ruin.

Go home now,” says I. “Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You are going to need it.” “What are we going to need it for?” asks a voice from the crowd. “For guns and ammunition,” says I.

Our era has produced many great men--- robber barons, masters of innovation, beast of business---whose staggering wealth, incomparable ruthlessness and personal legends would seem to prove they are dominant species but then one has a look at their son, and doubts the theory of evolution entirely. -DR. Bertrand Legmam Cooper, Problems of Science and Society, Posted by One Who Has Known Both, 1900

I am a citizen of this country,” I declare, “and Mr. Mayor, tonight I will be a citizen of this city when I put my shoes under my bed. The courageous men, women and children who are with me (blocked from crossing the bridge into NYC) are also citizens of this country and will be sleeping near their shoes too. I want them with me tonight, here, in the city of New York. We are all American citizens.” — Mother Jones

Homestead 42 is being aided and abetted by the most respectable of America’s robber barons—but don’t worry, they’ll be rewarded in giveaway tax breaks by Lindbergh’s Republican henchmen in the next pro-greed Congress.

Turning back to the crowd I say, “I am duty bound to make this plea, but I want to say, with all due respect to the governor here, that I doubt seriously that he will do — cannot do — anything. And for the reason that he is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the capitalists who placed him here in this building.” — Mother Jones

To the RKO motion picture camera at her 100th birthday party: “I pray for the day when working men and women are able to earn a fair share of the wealth they produce in a capitalist system, a day when all Americans are able to enjoy the freedom, rights and opportunities guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States of America.” — Mother Jones

The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

When the court is arrayed in splendor, The fields are full of weeds, And the granaries are empty. Some wear gorgeous clothes, Carry sharp swords, And indulge in food and drink; They have more possessions than they can use. They are robber barons. This is certainly not the way of Tao.

I go back to the union man and say, “Sir, this is a house of God, not a proper place for a union meeting. I have some things to say today that God would not want to hear in His own house. Boys, I want you to get up, every one of you, and go across the road. I want you to sit down on the hillside over there and wait for me to speak to you.

Good God, is the man a heathen?’ ‘Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture.

all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons’ cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” —C. S. Lewis

It would be easy to mistake Daley's tolerance of the Outfit for simple corruption. However, the more accurate assessment appears to be that Daley understood better than most that the sooner the hoods were promoted up the social ladder, the sooner they would disappear into the landscape much the same way as the Founding Fathers who institutionalized the enslavement from the African subcontinent, or the westward explorers who orchestrated the demise of more than six million Native Americans, or the aging robber barons who defrauded untold millions of their life savings. Why, Daley must have wondered, should Chicago's greedy frontiersmen be treated any different from their predecessors? Mayor Daley seemed to know innately what Kefauver had failed to grasp, and what Professor David Bell of Columbia University had labeled 'the progress of ethnic succession': The violence associated with the process was, at least in the case of organized crime, overwhelmingly intramural, and when it spilled over, it seemed to dissipate once the gang obtained what it believed was its rightful share of the American Dream. As Daley once responded to a question about his indulgence of the Outfit, 'Well, it's there, and you know you can't get rid of it, so you have to live with it.

Ultimately Rockefeller's confidence games proved wildly successful. At its height, his fortune outstripped those of all the other robber barons-even Carnegie's, by a hair. By 1913, Rockefeller's net worth totaled nearly a billion dollars, or 2 percent of the U.S. gross national product; a comparable share today would give Rockefeller a net worth of $190 billion, or more than triple that of the richest man in the contemporary world, Bill Gates.

[G]reater social equality can accompany, or parallel, shifts in economic distribution. In our case, they run at cross-purposes; in other countries, notably in the European Union, greater economic equality has actually accompanied greater social equality. There is no necessary and inevitable relationship between them. To believe that greater social equality is the cause of your economic misery requires a significant amount of manipulation, perhaps the single greatest bait and switch that has ever been perpetuated against middle- and lower-middle-class white Americans. This has been the cultural mission of the ruling elites -- to deny their own existence (at least the robber barons and other plutocrats were up-front about their economic standing) and pretend that they are on the side of the very people they are disenfranchising, even at the very moment they are disenfranchising them.

a new and shocking worldview, as many may learn that the much-discussed “New World Order” is simply the Old World Order. The means of exercising power are the same; only the technologies have changed. The caesars and kings of yesterday became the Robber Barons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who in turn have become the corporate owners of today. These self-styled globalists believe themselves to be more enlightened, entitled by heritage, and therefore, more worthy than others to rule the world.

But except for committed anarchists, the assassination attempt was widely condemned. In fact, it turned the tide of public opinion that, up until this moment, had been sympathetic to the strikers. Americans feared anarchists more than robber barons. Labor leaders, sensing the mood, went on the attack. “This man Berkman is an anarchist and, of course, is not identified with us,” said Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. “I cannot use language strong enough to express my condemnation of such an act as Berkman’s.

What the hell’s the matter with you men? Are you cowards as well as stupid? You boys make me sick. I’m done with you. You hear me? I want you to go back to your places now and stay with your children until I say you’re needed. “Tell your wives and your older children to bring with them dish pans and cooking pots. Tell them to bring their stirring spoons and ladles. Tell them to carry a mop over their shoulders. We’re goin’ to march on that mine and we’re going to stand guard to see that no scabs are allowed in. Do you hear me?” — Mother Jones

She was standing at the door, and the sheer visual delight, the sharp ache of happiness, something like the sight of fleeing moments of beauty that are so much a part of the life’s vanishing act, with its total absence of forever, filled him as usual with that greed, that tyrannical urge to seize, to keep and preserve and never lose again, which is perhaps how twenty thousand years ago the first image of an antelope came to be painted by an artist upon a rock. Then she put her blouse on and Time, the old robber baron, went by, carrying his loots away.

The country, it seemed, was on the verge of a second civil war, this one over industrial slavery. But Frick was a gambler who cared little what the world thought of him. He was already a villain in the public’s eye, thanks to a disaster of epic proportions three years earlier. Frick and a band of wealthy friends had established the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club on land near an unused reservoir high in the hills above the small Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. The club beautified the grounds around the dam but paid little attention to the dam itself, which held back the Conemaugh River and was in poor condition from years of neglect. On May 31, 1889, after heavy rainfall, the dam gave way, releasing nearly 5 billion gallons of water from Lake Conemaugh into Johnstown and killing 2,209 people. What became known as the Johnstown Flood caused $17 million in damages. Frick’s carefully crafted corporate structure for the club made it impossible for victims to pursue the financial assets of its members. Although he personally donated several thousands of dollars to relief efforts, Frick remained to many a scoundrel, the prototype of the uncaring robber baron of the Gilded Age.

The Cloisters, I knew, had been brought into being—like so many institutions—by John D. Rockefeller Jr. The robber baron’s son had transformed sixty-six isolated acres and a small collection of medieval art into a fully realized medieval monastery. Crumbling remnants of twelfth-century abbeys and priories had been imported throughout the 1930s from Europe and rebuilt under the watchful eye of architect Charles Collens. Buildings that had been left to the ravages of weather and wars were reassembled and polished to a new-world sheen—entire twelfth-century chapels restored, marble colonnades buffed to their original gloss.

This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.

Marx believed that as wealth becomes more concentrated, poverty will become more widespread and the plight of working people evermore desperate. According to his critics, this prediction has proven wrong. They point out that he wrote during a time of raw industrialism, an era of robber barons and the fourteen-hour work day. Through persistent struggle, the working class improved its life conditions from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Today, mainstream spokespersons portray the United States as a prosperous middle-class society. Yet one might wonder. During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, from 1981 to 1996, the share of the national income that went to those who work for a living shrank by over 12 percent. The share that went to those who live off investments increased almost 35 percent. Less than 1 percent of the population owns almost 50 percent of the nation’s wealth. The richest families are hundreds of times wealthier than the average household in the lower 90 percent of the population. The gap between America’s rich and poor is greater than it has been in more than half a century and is getting ever-greater. Thus, between 1977 and 1989, the top 1 percent saw their earnings grow by over 100 percent, while the three lowest quintiles averaged a 3 to 10 percent drop in real income.

Unlike religions that offered a better life after death, the idealist callings of anarchism espoused making heaven on earth by ridding humankind of the shackles of oppressive governments and capitalism. Labor unions, like those at Homestead, were grenadiers on the front lines of the struggle. By challenging the rule of the robber barons they deserved the support of revolutionaries. But now several years later, Goldman and Berkman (or Sasha, as she called him) still remained only bystanders to any potential revolution. “We continued our daily work, waiting on customers, frying pancakes, serving tea and ice cream,” said Goldman. “But our thoughts were in Homestead with those brave steelworkers.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.

Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet. The Soviet Union, with its megalomaniac Five Year Plans, was as obsessed with growth as the most cut-throat American robber baron. Just as Christians and Muslims both believed in heaven, and disagreed only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method. Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key for realising their disparate goals.

BECAUSE THIS MONEY came from Texas, the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century, on the immense influence exerted over America’s politics, its governmental institutions, its foreign and domestic policies by these forces: the oil and sulphur and gas and defense barons of the Southwest. As the robber barons of the last century looted the nation’s earth of its wealth—its coal and coke, its oil and ore, its iron, its forests, the very surface of its earth to provide a footing for the rails of their railroads—and used part of that wealth to ensure that the nation’s government would not force them to give more than a pittance of their loot back to the nation’s people, so the robber barons of this century have drained the earth of the Southwest of its riches and have used those riches to bend government to their ends.

After Standard Oil Company founder John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the world, he offered gardening advice to a group of young men at a Brown University Bible study. He told his admiring audience, “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” Rockefeller's audacious winner-take-all metaphor about the American Beauty rose was a description of how Standard Oil had bested its competitors. The clumsy reference to God at the end of the remarks was a meager attempt to morally sanction the ideas of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had recently seduced the robber baron community by adapting scientific ideas like “survival of the fittest” into a loose form of Social Darwinism that defined Gilded Age business.

Well, honey, it’s capitalism that brings out the meanness and greed,” says I. “Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enjoy the freedoms the Constitution offers. But capitalism came along without a constitution or a bill of rights and the industrialists grabbed unrestricted power. The capitalists wrote their own ‘Declaration of Capitalism’.” — Mother Jones

Cornelius Vanderbilt and his fellow tycoon John D. Rockefeller were often called 'robber barons'. Newspapers said they were evil, and ran cartoons showing Vanderbilt as a leech sucking the blood of the poor. Rockefeller was depicted as a snake. What the newspapers printed stuck--we still think of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller as 'robber barons'. But it was a lie. They were neither robbers nor barons. They weren't robbers, because they didn't steal from anyone, and they weren't barons--they were born poor. Vanderbilt got rich by pleasing people. He invented ways to make travel and shipping things cheaper. He used bigger ships, faster ships, served food onboard. People liked that. And the extra volume of business he attracted allowed him to lower costs. He cut the New York--Hartford fare from $8 to $1. That gave consumers more than any 'consumer group' ever has. It's telling that the 'robber baron' name-calling didn't come from consumers. It was competing businessmen who complained, and persuaded the media to join in. Rockefeller got rich selling oil. First competitors and then the government called him a monopolist, but he wasn't--he had competitors. No one was forced to buy his oil. Rockefeller enticed people to buy it by selling it for less. That's what his competitors hated. He found cheaper ways to get oil from the ground to the gas pump. This made life better for millions. Working-class people, who used to go to bed when it got dark, could suddenly afford fuel for their lanterns, so they could stay up and read at night. Rockefeller's greed might have even saved the whales, because when he lowered the price of kerosene and gasoline, he eliminated the need for whale oil. The mass slaughter of whales suddenly stopped. Bet your kids won't read 'Rockefeller saved the whales' in environmental studies class. Vanderbilt's and Rockefeller's goal might have been just to get rich. But to achieve that, they had to give us what we wanted.

In the late 1800s a certain man taught Sunday school for over 20 years in a Baptist church; he eventually became the wealthiest man in the world. He also did not pay tithes. He was not generous toward anyone, quite the opposite, he was the reason that journalists came up with the term, "Robber Baron." The man was John D. Rockefeller. He engaged in ruthless and illegal business practices and built an oil company called Standard Oil that was so large that, when it was broken up by antitrust laws, several major oil companies were created from that one company. Over one hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller was worth over one billion dollars, which would be 50 to 100 billion dollars in today’s money. If he did pay tithes it would have meant an income of 100 million dollars (5 to 10 billion today) to his local church. It was not God that "blessed" him with great wealth; it was Satan, the god of greed. God does not lead people to engage in ruthless and illegal business practices in a desire for more, more, more. Even in his old age, he displayed his greed by giving away dimes. He always had dimes in his pocket so he could generously give one to people he met! What lessons are we to learn from this? One very important thing is that very often Satan will give people lots of money because Satan knows that money is very deceitful and can make even the most devout Christian materialistic and greedy. Let's take a look at another example. There is today a man who planned to become a missionary when he was young, but he not only turned against his calling, he turned against Christianity. Do you suppose that God has blessed this man? He is today a multi-billionaire, media-mogul. The man is Ted Turner, who started CNN and is a partner in Time-Warner and other media companies. Can we use him as an example that God blesses a righteous man? No, actually, the opposite is most likely true, that Satan prospers those who turn from the straight way.

Reality is a curious thing. Truth is not as solid and universal as any of us would like it to be; selfishness guides perception, and perception invites justification. The physical image in the mirror, if not pleasing, can be altered by the mere brush of fingers through hair. And so it is true that we can manipulate our own reality. We can persuade, even deceive. We can make others view us in dishonest ways. We can hide selfishness with charity, make a craving for acceptance into magnanimity, and amplify our smile to coerce a hesitant lover. The world is illusion, and often delusion, as victors write the histories and the children who die quietly under the stamp of a triumphant army never really existed. The robber baron becomes philanthropist in the final analysis, by bequeathing only that for which he had no more use. The king who sends young men and women to die becomes beneficent with the kiss of a baby. Every problem becomes a problem of perception to those who understand that reality, in reality, is what you make reality to be. This

We put the dogs in a play and invited the parents, since there was no one else to be an audience. But the pets were poorly trained and failed to take direction. There were two soldiers and a fancy lady we’d dressed in a frilly padded bra. The soldiers were cowards. Deserters, basically. They ran away when we issued the battle cry. (A blaring klaxon. It went hoh-onk.) The lady urinated. “Oh, poor old thing, she has a nervous bladder!” exclaimed someone’s chubby mother. “Is that a Persian rug?” Whose mother was it? Unclear. No one would cop to it, of course. We canceled the performance. “Admit it, that was your mother,” said a kid named Rafe to a kid named Sukey, when the parents had filed out. Some of their goblets, highball glasses, and beer bottles were completely empty. Drained. Those parents were in a hurry, then. “No way,” said Sukey firmly, and shook her head. “Then who is your mother? The one with the big ass? Or the one with the clubfoot?” “Neither,” said Sukey. “So fuck you.” THE GREAT HOUSE had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.

The multinational is in the position of the bank robber in the old West; all he has to do is ride straight and hard to be safe, because the posse can’t cross the border. We have taken over the roles that nations recently held; we wage war, collect taxes through debt service, protect our areas of property and the worker/citizens within those areas, and we distribute power as we see fit.” Think of it this way. I am the baron. Templar international and Margrave Corporation and Avalon State Bank and so on are the castles I have built in different parts of my territory, for defense and expansion. The subsidiary companies we’ve bought or merged with owe their allegiance not to America but to Margrave. We reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. When necessary, we can protect our most important people from the laws of the state, just as the earlier barons could protect their most important vassal knights from the laws of the Catholic Church. The work force is tied to us by profit-sharing and pension plans. I don’t expect national governments to disappear, any more than the British or Dutch royal families have disappeared, but they will become increasingly irrelevant pageants. More and more, actors will play the parts of politicians and statesmen, while the real work goes on elsewhere.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

The second point is that, in the key industries we have studied, the state failed as an economic developer. It failed first as a subsidizer of industrial growth. Vanderbilt showed this in his triumph over the Edward Collins' fleet and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in the 1850s. James J. Hill showed this forty years later when his privately built Great Northern outdistanced the subsidized Northern Pacific and Union Pacific. The state next failed in the role of an entrepreneur when it tried to build and operate an armor plant in competition with Charles Schwab and Bethlehem Steel. The state also seems to have failed as an active regulator of trade. The evidence in this study is far from conclusive; but we can see problems with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-trust Act, both of which were used against the efficient Hill and Rockefeller.

A key to Scranton's success seems to have been the presence of aggressive entrepreneurs, who had a philosophy of openness and commitment to growth. As the spiral of growth in industries, services, and population persisted, the city of Scranton, which was founded on a hunch, officially became one of the forty largest cities in the country in 1900.44

A lot can be learned from the story of the Scrantons. The first lesson is that entrepreneurs are needed to create wealth; when they succeed, others then have the chance to build on what they started. If we look at the later history of Scranton, we can also learn a second lesson: that it is hard for those on top to stay there in the generations that follow. An inheritance can be transferred; but entrepreneurship, talent, and vision cannot be. The industrial city of Scranton saw lots of movement down the ladder of social mobility, as well as up.

in the 1890s, American rails were inferior to some foreign rails, so Hill bought English and German rails for the Great Northern. The subsidized transcontinentals were required in their charters to buy American-made steel, so they were stuck with the lesser product. Their charters also required them to carry government mail at a discount, and this cut into their earnings. Finally, without Congressional approval, the subsidized railroads could not build spur lines off the main line. Hill's Great Northern, in contrast, looked like an octopus, and he credited spur lines as critical to his success.

Charles and David brought their political resources to bear as never before during the 2012 election, which Charles called “the mother of all wars.” Yet they emerged from the crucible of the campaign having gained little more than a reputation as cartoonish robber barons, all-powerful political puppeteers who with one hand choreographed the moves of Republican politicians and with the other commanded the Tea Party army. As with all caricatures, this one bore only a faint resemblance to reality.

Hill was sad and predicted that the ICC and the Sherman Act would ruin American railroads and threaten cheap trade throughout the nation. A 72-year-old Hill would even write a book, Highways of Progress, to argue this point. But his last days seem to have been happy. He had built the best railroad in America and had used it to beat subsidized rivals time and again. He helped open the Northwest to settlement and the Orient to American trade. He had made a difference in the way the world worked. To some viewers, he was the real hero in the drama of the American transcontinental railroads.

The USA — its future as a nation and as a political, social, economic, and moral ideal — is now in the control of a few powerful individuals, groups, institutions, and nations. Those in control have shown little interest or concern for the nation and its citizens. They are the new robber barons of the old Gilded Age. And,

The predatory barons, kings, and princelings of the Middle Ages had bred a swarm of rulers with the political ethics of highway robbers and, for the most part, the intellects of stable boys.

The bar/restaurant was still open, and there was some kind of forgettable baseball game featured there, on the large screen, with no one watching, and you could see this from the uninhabited and threadbare lobby. The young man at the front desk looked like there was no sorrow he had not experienced, and you could imagine that the pariahs of Waterbury - the convicted frauds and disgraced politicians, the collectors of serial-killer memorabilia, the embezzlers of church donations, those found guilty of exposing themselves, the mortuary assistants with suppressed necrophiliac tendencies, the sadistic gym teachers and embittered traffic cops - all settled here when they were in search of the loneliest night imaginable, and nothing made them feel better than exceedingly loud smoove playing in the lobby. If you were experiencing catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, some flügelhorn soloing just might do the trick, could render you functionally unconscious in that way that hotel life can often do, unaware of any aspect of civilization that involves continuity, stability, devotion. However, it's also possible that smoove could be seen as a music that requires absolute submission to the American economy, to the need to buy and consume, and, as such, it is straight out of the robber-baron playbook, the music that can and must drive you to your knees so that you can do nothing but purchase plastic trinkets of Southeast Asian manufacture.

philosophy is no longer concerned with the quest for the truth of the world and so is reduced to a limited sphere, which only ensures the uninterrupted flow of capitalist markets. Truth as a philosophical category thus becomes enslaved to the unthinking markets of capitalism; philosophy at the service of the robber barons. Truth's instantiation is thus brutally reduced to the exercise of pure and arbitrary power in various domains of the world.

the Long Depression, an economic downturn in the United States and Europe that endured longer than the Great Depression two generations later. The industrial revolution created the plutocrats—we called them the robber barons—and the gap between them and everyone else.

But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a monopoly in any normal sense of that word, because here the dominance has nothing to do with technical performance or price. The old robber-baron monopolies were monopolies because they physically controlled means of production and/or distribution. But in the software business, the means of production is hackers typing code, and the means of distribution is the Internet, and no one is claiming that Microsoft controls those.

Pie-splitting didn’t require the substantial expense, time and risk of developing a new medicine, getting approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and marketing it. And it was entirely lawful. As Shkreli brazenly declared, ‘Everything we’ve done is legal’ and ‘I liken myself to the robber barons’8 – late-19th-century American businessmen who used similarly unscrupulous, yet legal, strategies to get rich.

Thomas Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Jay Gould, one of America’s great robber barons, owned the paper for a time. But by 1883, when Gould sold it, the World was losing $40,000 a year.

.."So you know everything now." Julian raised an eyebrow. "I can't believe that," he drawled. "There are no more secrets, no more illicit little plots percolating in your devious mind? You'll have to forgive me if I find that hard to credit, Violette." "Oh, there's one more secret," she said dully. "But only one, and you might as well know it. I love you. I love you so much it hurts. And I'll never love anyone else in the same way"..."There ,now," she said. That's all of it. I've tricked you and I've used you. I've lied to you, and rearranged your life to suit my own purposes. I forced you to leave Spain, and I'm the illegitimate daughter of a Penhallan and a robber baron. But I love you with my heart and soul, and I'd give my last drop of blood if you ever needed it." ..."But of course you won't ever need it, so I'll go now. And you need never fear that our paths will cross again." Turning from him, she began to walk back across the sand. "You omitted to mention puking all over my boots in that catalog of wrongs," Julian said. ..."I suppose you're entitled to that," she said. "Entitled to mock. Why should you believe in my love? Anyway, it's a poor thing. I know it can't excuse or make up what I've done to you." "Dear God," he said. "I'm assuming this extraordinary show of humility was brought on by that drug Penhallan gave you. I trust it's effect isn't permanent." ..."Oh you despicable bastard! You are an unmitigated cur!" She swooped down, grabbed a handful of sand, and threw it at him. Darting sideways, she picked up the empty cognac bottle. It flew through the air and caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder... ... Diabillo ! Virago! Termagant!" Julian taunted, grinning as he ducked one of Gabriel's boots. "Espadachin! Brute! Bully! Unchivalrous pig!" she hurled back.. ...He'd fought the knowledge ..he'd been fighting it for weeks..and now he'd lost the battle. She was a lawless, manipulative, illegitimate half-breed, no possible wife for a St Simon, and he didn't give a damn.

Sacklers’ wealth had been accumulated not in the era of the robber barons but in recent decades.

One thing that the global justice movement taught us is that politics is, indeed, ultimately about value; but also, that those creating vast bureaucratic systems will almost never admit what their values really are. This was as true of the Carnegies as it is today. Normally, they will—like the robber barons of the turn of the last century—insist that they are acting in the name of efficiency, or “rationality.” But in fact this language always turns out to be intentionally vague, even nonsensical. The term “rationality” is an excellent case in point here. A “rational” person is someone who is able to make basic logical connections and assess reality in a non-delusional fashion. In other words, someone who isn’t crazy. Anyone who claims to base their politics on rationality—and this is true on the left as well as on the right—is claiming that anyone who disagrees with them might as well be insane, which is about as arrogant a position as one could possibly take. Or else, they’re using “rationality” as a synonym for “technical efficiency,” and thus focusing on how they are going about something because they do not wish to talk about what it is they are ultimately going about. Neoclassical economics is notorious for making this kind of move. When an economist attempts to prove that it is “irrational” to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say “irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, or the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage.” There is absolutely no reason why one could not rationally calculate the best way to further one’s political ideals through voting. But according to the economists’ assumptions, anyone who takes this course might as well be out of their minds.

And it became clear to him that his early mentors—the founders, the dead sages of the judiciary—did not have modern counterparts in government. The great roofs that had sheltered them were raised now not over heads of state but over the motile geniuses of corporate novelty; these men now wore the mantles formerly worn by the fathers of the nation-state. They held up economies and reshaped them at will. After the robber barons had come the technophile visionaries, the practical philosophers of earning, and they, not the government men, were the new kingmakers.

The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.” “That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules?

In 1878 the American robber baron Jay Gould created a company that began to threaten the monopoly of the telegraph company Western Union. The directors of Western Union decided to buy Gould’s company up— they had to spend a hefty sum, but they figured they had managed to rid themselves of an irritating competitor. A few months later, though, Gould was it at again, complaining he had been treated unfairly. He started up a second company to compete with Western Union and its new acquisition. The same thing happened again: Western Union bought him out to shut him up. Soon the pattern began for the third time, but now Gould went for the jugular: He suddenly staged a bloody takeover struggle and managed to gain complete control of Western Union. He had established a pattern that had tricked the company’s directors into thinking his goal was to be bought out at a handsome rate. Once they paid him off, they relaxed and failed to notice that he was actually playing for higher stakes. The pattern is powerful in that it deceives the other person into expecting the opposite of what you are really doing.

The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

At the twentieth century’s dawn, Rockefeller’s sanguinary maneuvering—including bribery, price-fixing, corporate espionage, and creating shell companies to conduct illegal activities—had won his Standard Oil Company control of 90 percent of US oil production and made him the richest man in world history with a net worth of over half a trillion in today’s dollars. Senator Robert Lafayette excoriated Rockefeller as “the greatest criminal of the age.”39 The oil magnate’s father, William “Devil Bill” Rockefeller, was a marauding con artist who supported his family by posing as a doctor and hawking snake oil, opium elixirs, patent medicines, and other miracle cures.40 In the early 1900s, as scientists discovered pharmaceutical uses for refinery by-products, John D. saw an opportunity to capitalize on the family’s medical pedigree. At that time, nearly half the physicians and medical colleges in the United States practiced holistic or herbal medicine. Rockefeller and his friend Andrew Carnegie, the Big Steel robber baron, dispatched educator Abraham Flexner on a cross-country tour to catalog the status of America’s 155 medical colleges and hospitals.

Big business often is said to be the enemy of government, but that is highly misleading. The robber barons were robbers because they bought off legislatures in order to further their economic interests at the expense of competitors and customers.

PROFIT noun prof·it \'prä-fәt\ (1.) money that is made in a business, through investing, etc., after all the costs and expenses are paid: a financial gain (2.) the advantage or benefit that is gained from doing something —Merriam-Webster’s definition (1.) value stolen from the working class and pawns of the robber-baron oligarchy (2.) a means of thievery through the peaceful and voluntary exchange of goods or services kept in place to maintain a permanent system of inequality and class exploitation —A Leftist’s definition

To argue this way is to miss a key point: Scranton's founders, as entrepreneurs, created something out of nothing. They created their assets and created opportunities for others when they successfully bore the risks of making America's first iron rails. Without them, almost everybody else in the region would have been poorer. The amount of wealth in a region (or a country) is not fixed; in 1870, Scranton, Platt, and Blair got the biggest piece of the economic pie, but it was the biggest piece of a much larger pie—made so by what they cooked up when they came to Pennsylvania thirty years earlier.

They worried that mindfulness would simply create better baby killers and robber barons.

Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day’s grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn’t anyone’s, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there’s nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead’s sheep.” “Sounds like bullshit to me.” “Oh, it is,” Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. “It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.” “That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.

This system of charitable giving increased exponentially during the early 1900s when the first multimillionaire robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Russell Sage, created new institutions that would exist in perpetuity and support charitable giving in order to shield their earnings from taxation.

Who has the Problem? Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell, one of the most grotesque robber barons in recent British history, liked to say that someone who owed the bank a million pounds had a serious problem, but if the same person owed the bank a billion pounds then it was the bank that had the serious problem. This insane ideology was adapted by the banks themselves. A bank with a debt of a hundred billion dollars has a problem and could be declared insolvent by the markets and State. A bank with a debt of a trillion dollars could make the State insolvent, so it’s the State that now has the problem. Banks made themselves so big and made the State (and global) economy so dependent on them that, if they failed, the whole economy would fail. So, they were all tacitly underwritten by the State, and State bailouts were therefore inevitable in the financial meltdown of 2008. The question is why any State allowed any financial institution to become “too big to fail” and thus a direct threat to the stability of the State. No sane State would ever allow itself to be controlled and blackmailed by an entity over which it has no say and no control. The fact that States did allow this to happen proves that unelected, unaccountable “free markets” (i.e. corporations, banks and the super rich) are running nations, and not their democratically elected politicians. Governments are puppet institutions and the puppetmasters are never up for election. Any sane government would have a specific department of State whose specific purpose was to prevent any bank or corporation becoming too big to fail, or any organisation or individual becoming too rich and too powerful.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” —C.S. Lewis   With a belief in the goodness of people, I offer the facts regarding CPS. You can do what you like with these facts, but to ignore them for the sake of comfort is to turn your back on what is right. From the horrific effects of foster homes, to the financial incentives to remove children from their parents, from the Drug War that is pushed forward more by CPS than it is by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), to the destruction of families—the good intentions of caseworkers cannot repel these bad consequences of a system that does very little to help those who need it the most.   What Is Child Protective Services?   Child Protective Services (CPS) is the name of the U.S. government agency that responds to reports of child abuse or neglect (3). Not every state calls this agency CPS. Other

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” —C.S. Lewis   With

Looking Backward was a not-so-subtle indictment of robber barons, speculation, and greed, a paean to cooperation and redistribution. It sparked Bellamy Clubs, inspired experiments in collective living, fueled growing interest in cooperatively owned enterprise, and sold more copies than almost any other book of its time.

The rise of Robber Barons and their monopoly trusts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries underscores that, as we already emphasized in chapter 3, the presence of markets is not by itself a guarantee of inclusive institutions. Markets can be dominated by a few firms, charging exorbitant prices and blocking the entry of more efficient rivals and new technologies. Markets, left to their own devices, can cease to be inclusive, becoming increasingly dominated by the economically and politically powerful. Inclusive economic institutions require not just markets, but inclusive markets that create a level playing field and economic opportunities for the majority of the people. Widespread monopoly, backed by the political power of the elite, contradicts this. But the reaction to the monopoly trusts also illustrates that when political institutions are inclusive, they create a countervailing force against movements away from inclusive markets. This is the virtuous circle in action. Inclusive economic institutions provide foundations upon which inclusive political institutions can flourish, while inclusive political institutions restrict deviations away from inclusive economic institutions. Trust busting in the United States, in contrast to what we have seen in Mexico illustrates this facet of the virtuous circle. While there is no political body in Mexico restricting Carlos Slim’s monopoly, the Sherman and Clayton Acts have been used repeatedly in the United States over the past century to restrict trusts, monopolies, and cartels, and to ensure that markets remain inclusive.

The Jes Grew crisis was becoming acute. Compounding it, Black Yellow and Red Mu'tafikah were looting the museums shipping the plunder back to where it came from. America, Europe's last hope, the protector of the archives of "mankind's" achievements had come down with a bad case of Jes Grew and Mu'tafikah too. Europe can no longer guard the "fetishes" of civilizations which were placed in the various Centers of Art Detention, located in New York City. Bootlegging Houses financed by Robber Barons, Copper Kings, Oil Magnets, Tycoons and Gentlemen Planters. Dungeons for the treasures from Africa, South America and Asia. The army devoted to guarding this booty is larger than those of most countries. Justifiably so, because if these treasures got into the "wrong hands" (the countries from which they were stolen) there would be renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons of the aesthetically victimized civilizations.

Rockefeller “The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit — a reputation,

This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers," Vlad said. "Robber barons are not really very efficient.

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn’t want to put restraints on “robber barons”—he might become one, one day!

Montreal, boasted its share of piles, built by the Scottish robber barons, of railway, booze and banking money. They were held together with hubris, a short-term binder at best since many of them had long ago been torn down or donated to McGill University, which needed another Victorian monstrosity like it needed the Ebola virus.

If the government had not subsidized a transcontinental, then private investors like Hill would have built them sooner and would have built them better. Subsidy promoters tried to deny this argument at the time, but Hill's achievement shows that it would have been done, only at a slower (but more efficient) pace.

Here is a key point: the gain in social return was only temporary, but the loss of shipping with an inefficient railroad was permanent. The UP and NP were, as we have seen, inefficient in gradients, curvature, length, quality of construction, repair costs, and use of fuel. This meant permanently high fixed costs for all passengers and freight using the subsidized transcontinentals.

Few people were willing to exert the perspiration necessary to learn the railroad business and apply these principles. Many, like Villard, Gould, and Stanford, took the easy route and chased subsidies, hiked rates, and manipulated stock; but this approach never built a winning railroad.

What Hill ultimately deplored more than tariffs and subsidies were the ICC and the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Congress passed these vague laws to protest rate hikes and monopolies. They were passed to satisfy public clamor (which was often directed at wrong-doing committed by Hill's subsidized rivals). Because they were vaguely written, they were harmless until Congress and the Supreme Court began to give them specific meaning. And here came the irony: laws that were passed to thwart monopolists, were applied to, thwart Hill.

As written, the Sher- man Act banned "every combination. . .in restraint of trade." This vaguely written law was an immediate problem because every act of trade potentially restrains other trade. This meant that the courts would have to decide what the law meant.