All Posts Tagged With: "robber barons"
The Gilded Age: A Modest Revision
Mark Twain named the decades after 1865 the “Gilded Age,” and Progressive historian Vernon Louis Parrington sketched them in some detail in 1927. For Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, volume 3), the Gilded Age was a “Great Barbecue” of continuous government largesse and State-assisted capital accumulation under a very simple philosophy: “[P]reemption [of land] meant exploitation [...]
21Sep2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Kid and the Benevolent Bully
The kid had eighteen cents. The benevolent bully had a buck-forty-nine. The kid went to the corner candy store and bought a licorice pipe and a jawbreaker for two cents. He was giving serious consideration to the chewable wax lips when he overheard a big kid at the fountain ordering a large lemonade for a [...]
21Apr2011 | Roger Koopman | 8 comments | ContinuedHow Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present
Professor Thomas DiLorenzo of Loyola College, Maryland, has managed to pack two books into the volume titled How Capitalism Saved America. The first is the work promised in the title, the inspiring story about the creative power of that nexus of voluntary exchanges known as capitalism. The second, more sobering, book inhabiting these same pages [...]
13Jul2010 | Robert Batemarco | 24 comments | ContinuedThe Forgotten Robber Barons
Conventional wisdom, which often is mostly convention and very little wisdom, confidently instructs us that rapacious capitalists dominated and victimized American society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The white knight of government then rode to the rescue of hapless workers and consumers. The message: business bad, government good. Honest, objective historians of [...]
19Apr2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Rise of Big Business and the Growth of Government
Most people learn about the relation between the rise of big business and the growth of government in the form of what amounts to a morality play. In the most widely disseminated version, presented in nearly every American history textbook, the emergence of big business (playing the role of the devil) is said to have [...]
19Aug2009 | Robert Higgs | 28 comments | ContinuedThe American Land Question
Widespread landownership long supported a kind of liberal-republican independence. Perhaps we should reexamine the nexus and ask ourselves how, in Donald Davidson’s words, we “let the freehold pass,” and whether that was really for the best.
10Jun2009 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 6 comments | ContinuedPostal Monopoly: Playing by Different Rules
Once again the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is seeking to use its monopoly power to defy the economic law of demand. On April 8 the USPS requested an increase in the first-class letter rate from 37 to 39 cents, a 5.4 percent jump. Between 2000 and 2004, the price of first-class postage increased 12.1 percent, [...]
1Jul2005 | Robert Carreira | 1 comment | ContinuedMoney & Power: The History of Business
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. • 2001 • 274 pages • $27.95 Reviewed by John Hood Television can be not only entertaining but educational, as long as you are not seeking great depth or elaborate argumentation. That means that it’s possible to adapt excellent writing for television but not the reverse. In Money & Power: [...]
1May2002 | Howard Means | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Inventive Period
Andrew Bernstein teaches philosophy at Pace University and is working on a book, The Capitalist Manifesto. An issue of American Heritage (November 1999), a magazine devoted to analyzing important cultural issues in U.S. history, contains an article that provides ample clues to the true nature of late nineteenth-century America. The piece, “People of Progress,” features [...]
1Apr2001 | Andrew Bernstein | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Ghost of John D. Rockefeller
At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on competitiveness in the computer industry last March, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was compared to the infamous “robber baron” John D. Rockefeller and his company likened to the Standard Oil Company of the late nineteenth century. Federal Trade Commission chairman Robert Pitofsky made a similar analogy in a Washington [...]
1Jun1998 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | Continued-
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