The "Robber Barons"
Travel A
Travel A
From The Wall Street Journal:
(March 6, 2010)
Bring Back the Robber Barons. There's a big difference between
entrepreneurs who make a fortune in the market, and those who do so by
gaming the government. By DANIEL HENNINGER
Faced with high, painful unemployment as far as the eye can see, the
government naturally is here to help.
The Senate passed a $15 billion "jobs bill." Its proudest piece is a tax
credit for employers who hire a person out of work at least 60 days. The
employer won't have to pay the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax for what
remains of this year. If the worker stays on the job at least a year,
the government will give the employer $1,000.
As to the earlier $787 billion stimulus bill, Vice President Joe Biden
praised it in Orlando this week as an engine of job creation, while he
stood before a pile of broken concrete and asphalt. The subject was
highways.
Finally, Barack Obama's government now may force companies to raise
wages and benefits by squeezing their federal contracts if they don't.
Maybe there's a better way.
***
Let's bring back the robber barons.
"Robber baron" became a term of derision to generations of American
students after many earnest teachers made them read Matthew Josephson's
long tome of the same name about the men whose enterprise drove the
American industrial age from 1861 to 1901.
Josephson's cast of pillaging villains was comprehensive: Rockefeller,
Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor, Jay Gould, James J. Hill. His table
of contents alone shaped impressions of those times: "Carnegie as
'business pirate'.'' "Henry Frick, baron of coke." "Terrorism in Oil."
"The sack of California."
I say, bring 'em back, and the sooner the better. What we need, a lot
more than a $1,000 tax credit, are industries no one has thought of
before. We need vision, vitality and commercial moxie. This government
is draining it away.
Podcast: Listen to the audio of Wonder Land here. The antidote to
Josephson's book is a small classic by Hillsdale College historian
Burton W. Folsom called "The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at
the Rise of Big Business in America" (Young America's Foundation). Prof.
Folsom's core insight is to divide the men of that age into market
entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs.
Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built
businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who
finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant.
Rockefeller took on and beat the world's dominant oil power at the time,
Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the
political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year
monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New
York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan "New Jersey must
be free," broke Fulton's government-granted monopoly.
If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the
Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center
of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public
subsidies for wind and solar technologies plus taxes on carbon to
suppress it as a competitor. Politically connected entrepreneurs will
spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies,
congressional committees and Beltway door openers. Our best market
entrepreneurs, instead of exhausting themselves on their new ideas, will
run to ground gaming Barack Obama's ideas.
............
View Full Image
Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis
James J. Hill (center) built a great railroad on his own dime.
....................
If the goal is job growth, we need to admit one fact: Political
entrepreneurs create fewer jobs than do market entrepreneurs. We need
new mass markets, really big markets of the sort Ford, Rockefeller and
Carnegie created. Great employment markets are discoverable only by
people who create opportunities or see them in the cracks of what
already exists—a Federal Express or Wal-Mart. Either you believe
that the philosopher kings of the Obama administration can figure out
this sort of thing, or you don't. I don't.
FDIC chief Sheila Bair whacked bank bonuses Tuesday. People on the East
Coast spend too much time around the finance and insurance industries.
If the price of rediscovering the American job machine is some people
across the land getting really rich, it's a small price.
One of the richest now is Larry Ellison, the 1977 founder of Oracle
Corp. (49,000 employees), whose tastes run to huge boats, bigger houses
and paying Elton John to play for his friends at the Cow Palace. Someone
in our politics has to find the courage to say, So what? If the next
Ellison and Oracle ripples into American life as many new jobs and
family incomes, I'm happy to be grossed out by parties and boats. The
alternative is a nation of Pecksniffs, choking on virtue.
We live in a world of rising competitors—foreign robber
barons—who don't much care about our endless quest for
health-care justice. The U.S. on its current path to a stage-managed
economy floating in a lake of taxes will keep down the greatest
population of intellectual and managerial firepower the world has seen.
The rest of the world admits that, with the recent exception of the
Chinese, who think we're ready to be taken. We have young people
impatient for the chance to do what Carnegie, Rockefeller and Hill did.
Let them.
Paul Popinjay
push through the 16th Amendment.
Well, why would a rich man like he do that? Good question.
At the same time they were scheming about a tax on income, they were also
scheming about a way that they could avoid the income tax, when their
competition, the rest of us, would be burdened by it.
Hence, the tax-free foundation.
RichD
> Did you know that Rockefeller was FOR the income tax?
> His agents helped push through the 16th Amendment.
Cite?
> Well, why would a rich man like he do that? Good question.
>
> At the same time they were scheming about a tax on
> income, they were also scheming about a way that they
> could avoid the income tax, when their
> competition, the rest of us, would be burdened by it.
The rest of us are their customers, not their competition.
> Hence, the tax-free foundation.
Does not compute...
--
Rich
Paul Popinjay
news:d4413978-520e-4776...@b36g2000pri.googlegroups.com...
> The rest of us are their customers, not their competition.
Well, if you try to run a business, and acquire a lot of wealth, YOU have to
contend with an income tax. But Rockefeller and "those types" don't.
Essentially, they can make gazillions, and shift it from their right hand to
their left hand, put it into tax-free foundations, which they control. What
an ingenious way to hinder their competition. Instill a burdensome tax on
them, that they are exempt from. Brilliant.
Google the following statement, Rich. "Competition is a sin"
Pepe Papon
<r_dela...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>On Mar 7, "Paul Popinjay" <paulpopin...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> Did you know that Rockefeller was FOR the income tax? �
>> His agents helped push through the 16th Amendment.
>
>Cite?
>
>> Well, why would a rich man like he do that? �Good question.
>>
>> At the same time they were scheming about a tax on
>> income, they were also scheming about a way that they
>> could avoid the income tax, when their
>> competition, the rest of us, would be burdened by it.
>
>The rest of us are their customers, not their competition.
If current economic trends continue, eventually we'll be their
subjects.
--
~ Seth Jackson
MySpace URL - http://www.myspace.com/sethjacksonsong
Songwriting and Music Business Info: http://www.sethjackson.net
Follow
Absolutely, if Democrats keep making competition impossible through more
regulations, taxes, licenses, and other small business hating bullshit
laws, we will end up as subjects soon.
Follow :)
______________________________________________________________________�
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Pepe Papon
wrote:
>On Mar 8 2010 1:42 AM, Pepe Papon wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 7 Mar 2010 21:52:49 -0800 (PST), RichD
>> <r_dela...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Mar 7, "Paul Popinjay" <paulpopin...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> >> Did you know that Rockefeller was FOR the income tax? �
>> >> His agents helped push through the 16th Amendment.
>> >
>> >Cite?
>> >
>> >> Well, why would a rich man like he do that? �Good question.
>> >>
>> >> At the same time they were scheming about a tax on
>> >> income, they were also scheming about a way that they
>> >> could avoid the income tax, when their
>> >> competition, the rest of us, would be burdened by it.
>> >
>> >The rest of us are their customers, not their competition.
>>
>> If current economic trends continue, eventually we'll be their
>> subjects.
>Absolutely, if Democrats keep making competition impossible through more
>regulations, taxes, licenses, and other small business hating bullshit
>laws, we will end up as subjects soon.
You misspelled, "If the system continues to be set up so that the rich
keep getting richer at the expense of everyone else".
RichD
> > >> At the same time they were scheming about a tax on
> > >> income, they were also scheming about a way that they
> > >> could avoid the income tax, when their
> > >> competition, the rest of us, would be burdened by it.
>
> > >The rest of us are their customers, not their competition.
>
> > If current economic trends continue, eventually we'll be their
> > subjects.
>
> through more regulations, taxes, licenses, and other small business
> hating bullshit laws, we will end up as subjects soon.
Welcome to the evil empire...
What does GM stand for, in 2010?
--
RIch
Frisbieinstein
>
More robber barons would be wonderful. I would love to be paying
$10000 a year for water.
FL Turbo
Huh?
Frisbieinstein
> On Mon, 8 Mar 2010 17:42:48 -0800 (PST), Frisbieinstein
>
> >On Mar 8, 9:11 am, nine...@webtv.net (Travel A) wrote:
>
> >More robber barons would be wonderful. I would love to be paying
> >$10000 a year for water.
>
> Huh?
When robber barons get control of the water system, that's how much it
will cost. I can hardly wait. Think of how much it will boost the
GDP.
bo dark
His name is T.Boone Pickens.