No. You mean the guys that built the country and made us an economic power house and a world power?
This is probably a good book for you to check out.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315
I am talking about Wilson and the how he really got us on the path to socialism and how that trying to mix socialism with just enough capitalism to pay for it has not and will not ever work.
But mainly my post was about the person who put this sticker on his car has no clue what they are talking about. We are moving closer and closer to European style socialism and Bernie would like to make us move that way even faster. So if you are "sick of this shit" the would mean you are sick of the move to socialism. Thus the bumper sticker is an sort of an oxymoron(doesn't quite fit the definition but it is close.)
Sort of like this one.
Cops are so violent and are killing people/only cops should have guns.
You saying not true things don't make them true.
There were no Robber Barrons, only government manipulations of the market.
The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America https://www.amazon.com/dp/0963020315/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_WEE3M59V5T6FF81AH9AQ
You don't know what words mean. I'm not manipulating, just telling truth in light of your disinformation.
This is wrong.
As Burton Folsom explained there were / are market entpreneurs and political entpreneurs.
I agree political (statist and anti-liberty) entpreneurs should not exist but market entpreneurs (James J. Hill, Vanderbilt, Carnegie) have greatly benefited society who should / would exist in an actual free market.
The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America https://www.amazon.com/dp/0963020315/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_KTDE3VE3JYVMT5KY0PE0
Andrew Carnegie severely reduced the price of steel, in less than a quarter-century it was reduced from 160 bucks per ton to only just under 20 bucks a ton.
Also, there were tarrifs in place to prevent a lot of steel from being cheaply imported (carnegie supported these policies, boo on carnegie for that)
You might want to read, "The Myth of the Robber Barons" by Burton Folsom.
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
>This is the mother of all ignorant, revisionist history, craziness I have ever read.
That's not an argument. Try not to believe everything you were taught in public school history class.
I haven't read the book so I can't adequately analyze the quote since I am seeing it out of context. That said, do the authors document how the monopolies emerged? If the late 19th century was a truly laissez-faire free market society (meaning absolutely no government or central bank intervention), then they might be right. If, however, there was intervention, we need to see if those interventions themselves aided in the creation of monopolies. In the former case, we would also need to question how the monopoly formed and why it persisted. There are just too many questions unanswered from the context you gave. This also reflects the popular ideas of the era which most people swallow whole without question and get upset when it is challenged.
The historian Burton Folsom has done some work on the era. Below is a link to an article he wrote on the origin of the term and idea of the "robber barron" and a book he wrote on the nuanced economic history of the era:
https://fee.org/articles/how-the-myth-of-the-robber-barons-began-and-why-it-persists/
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
(Please note that I am open minded enough to have my mind changed, but a reddit comment is not sufficient. If you disagree with my assessment, point me to a well written history of the Guilded Age that takes the questions I mentioned above into account. Two other questions that the book(s) need to answer are: if the urban work and quality of life were so awful even by that era's standards, why did so many people choose to abandon the rural life and European nations to undergo such conditions? Did working class wealth stay static or regress, or did their wealth increase alongside the rich?)
The Myth of the Robber Barons by Burton Folsom
Capitalism and the Historians by F. A. Hayek and others. (might be too early to be considered "progressive era", but I think it is pretty related).
Also, what u/properal said
A lot of propaganda came out of that age, due to bad actors winning political favor and being able to write the history.
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
Robber Barons are myth. The rich people in the past who actually stifled competition used the Government. https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
>You do realize that for you to be a landlord, someone else has to be without his own apartment/house right? So that means that someone else actually has no private property in this regard.
>In case of socialism, i can imagine that there would be landlords anyways, but if not, it’s only because people would own the houses they live in instead of paying rent all the time.
This doesn't answer my question, and your premise if false anyway.
>No, all that these papers are saying is that entrepreneurs aren’t some crazy risk taking geniuses, but the ones, who appear to start doing what they do is because they have this safety net.
Yeah, I said that, and I never made that claim. But if that's all it takes, why doesn't everyone with a safety become and entrepreneur?
>This guy that you gave me on YouTube is a little bit of a moron. After listening to what he said for like 8 minutes I had to see if he has actually debated any high profile Marxist economist live, and I couldn’t find anything
There, that's two Marxists. Anyway, do you know who he is? He's an author, entrepreneur, runs a hedge fund, head of the Ayn Rand institute, and he was a socialist until about his twenties. He's not just some random "moron" i found online.
>Because his shit doesn’t hold water and he oversimplifies the real world situation to a point that’s convenient to him. And I think that should actually be a really good indication as to which side you should really be listening to more. The guys who oversimplify stuff, it the guys that take a lot more things in consideration, but ok.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0963020315/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fab_CwJAFbQBX2MES
Read that.
>So he mentioned this one oil company as a monopoly, although shortly after he said that it had 93% share, but only within U.S. That’s not a fucking monopoly unless U.S. is closed economy
But that company was the reason for antitrust laws in this country.
>That’s just a large corporation. And the real threat comes not out of the fact, that these tiny 7% will start producing or selling for smaller price, simply because they couldn’t even fucking afford it, but other large corporations outside of US that could enter the market.
So that's competition, goes against what you said earlier. And this why a monopoly doesn't exist.
>And the claim of his that monopolies lead to lower prices and that all of the poor monopolies were broken up just as they were trying to give to the people the lowest prices. What an absolute moron. Upcoming monopolies indeed lower prices in order to wipe out competition, because the larger market share you have, the smaller the marginal costs you have in production, because you are utilizing your machines more
So how is this bad for the consumer. Whether you're right or he's right, its still lower costs for the consumer.
>That’s not a magical permanent byproduct of monopolies being the most efficient and run by geniuses. That’s a part of fucking other competitors out of business.
Sounds like good business to me.
>But once we go to globalization and getting true monopolies, that’s when it gets more serious.
>And the funniest part is that even he acknowledges that a byproduct of monopolies is slower innovation etc., etc., but he just downplays it like it’s nothing
Hey dumbass, that's why monopolies don't exist and can't exist. Even if they did, they wouldn't last long, as he said. Everything you said just confirmed what he said you just said it differently. Either way, I'd believe Yaron Brook over you, and most people.
>This guy just has too small of a capacity for analyzing.
You love insulting people. Not sure how it helps your argument, but okay.
>Oh, and btw. Don’t give me bread, because there’s virtually no way you can monopolize bread or any food for that matter. That’s just another demonstration of your pretty weak thinking capabilities. Give me something that the customer has virtually no alternatives to. Check out that Valeant case. It’s medicine related. That’s an area where you have fewer options than a loaf of bread.
It was just an example, don't freak out about it. Something the consumer has no options over? And you want a medical example? Okay. Epipens. They were patented, there was one company who was allowed to make them per government order, and competition was not allowed. So the CEO raised the prices extremely high, and everyone freaked out. After this, the government started allowing competition, and now there's generic brands and the Epipen is a lot cheaper. But, since the government created that monopoly, the CEO could raise the prices to whatever she wanted. Same thing with internet providers in the US local governments don't allow competition to enter their area because the companies already there have deals with the local cities and towns. There is a growing internet provider that's HQ is about 20 minutes from where I live, but my state doesn't allow them to enter. I can't give a real example of market formed monopolies because they don't exist. With the Valeant case, I really don't care about price gouging, but we can still see how this was created by government. The FDA makes it extremely hard to make generic versions of medicine (same problem with the epipen case, although they are trying to change it: https://www.pharmacytimes.com/publications/issue/2019/april2019/fda-to-increase-generic-competition-of-complex-drugs) and because of our stupid insurance system, companies can change prices dramatically without consumers noticing until it's too late. If we had a free market in both drug creation and insurance, these things would not happen.
>The reason why the companies are doing tons of stock buybacks with the cheap money they are getting now is exactly because the customers are losing their capability to buy year after year.
You know stock buybacks aren't always a bad thing right? In fact, they typically aren't a bad thing. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040815/what-situations-does-it-benefit-company-buy-back-outstanding-shares.asp
>The business will charge only what the customer will pay? Hmm, interesting why the U.S is so debt ridden.
You don't think that's because people make bad decisions with money? You really think it's because everything is just too expensive?
Here, try reading a book that isn’t bullshit Union-approved propaganda: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
And the “political entrepreneurs” can’t operate if there isn’t a government to take advantage of. Hence, free market = free from government regulations AND influence peddling, revolving door, bribes, lobbyists, etc. ALL of that gets eliminated in a free-market.
This is not a failing of "capitalism", or the free market.
Cartels have been historically broken by competitors or even betrayal inside of the cartel when a member decides to make more money at the expense of the cartel who are intentionally marketing an inferior product, by selling the superior one.
"Greed" in fact destroys cartels, it does not sustain them. The only cartels and monopolies that survive are those that are defended from free market forces by government interference through "regulation" and corporate welfare.
Meh, this is going to be downvoted to oblivion. It's much easier to say "Capitalism bad cuz greed." then it is to actually understand how free market economies work.
For the few actually interested in the truth and not just bashing the "capitalism" boogeyman;
Myth of the Robber Barons by Burton W. Fulsom >The theory of natural monopoly is also ahistorical. There is no evidence of the "natural-monopoly" story ever having been carried out — of one producer achieving lower long-run average total costs than everyone else in the industry and thereby establishing a permanent monopoly. As discussed below, in many of the so-called public-utility industries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were often literally dozens of competitors.
>This would only be a waste if you push longevity ahead of technological improvement. Individual consumers are free to do that, but we have no basis for declaring this value set as fixed and unchanging. We do not live, nor do we wish to live, in a world that is static, where development never occurs, where what exists has always existed and always will.
>But what about the executives who will cut corners, even to the point of breaking the law, to expand their own salaries and power? Here the Chicken Littles are correct about the problem, but they're wrong about the solution.
>I'd be curious to see it.
Check this out for starters. Since you didn't name a specific example for me to address, I can only imagine that you're referring to the common caricature of the "robber barron" era in mid 19th century.
>Companies with more money are more able to create barriers to entry.
Agreed. Unfortunately, the primary way they do this is through creation of favorable government regulation, so I don't see how this helps your argument. Look at the telecom industry if you want an example.
>Multiple companies with a large amount of market share would be incentivized to collude with each other (at least to the point of preventing new market participants from entering - including but not limited to hostile takeover).
I'm assuming you're referring to a policy of "predatory pricing." This doesn't happen, because such a strategy is extremely detrimental to the health of the business. The business in the stronger position would have to take losses on their comparatively higher market share in hopes of driving the smaller competitor out of business. If this is achieved, they must immediately raise their prices to recoup the losses sustained in the previous bout of competition. This puts them in a particularly vulnerable position against new potential competitors - essentially their profit is delayed.... indefinitely. Collusion doesn't happen either. You said it yourself - the business is profit-motivated. Why settle for 50% of the market when they can have more? Unless you want to make an exception to your assertion for this one example...
>I'm not sure what the whole "sticking a gun in someone's face" thing is about.
What is the implied threat behind every government action, be it tax or regulation, if the individual refuses to cooperate? It is, quite literally, the threat of violence. Do you disagree that government, at a base level, is force?
> It's really creepy how all of you guys are using that exact same Mises article as a source and repeating the same thing about standard oil.
The Myth of the Robber Barons is a book, not an article on Mises.
Oh, you mean history like this?
Or this?
Or this?
>The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the time of the "robber barons."
>It is a staple of history books to attach this derogatory phrase to such figures as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the great nineteenth-century railroad operators — Grenville Dodge, Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others. To most historians writing on this period, these entrepreneurs committed thinly veiled acts of larceny to enrich themselves at the expense of their customers. Once again we see the image of the greedy, exploitative capitalist, but in many cases this is a distortion of the truth.
History is written by the victors, and the Government won. Wise up, Reddit.