Any student of history who has actually done their homework and really read on the topic should be able to tell you that the "Robber Baron" era was made possible by a lot of things we'd now find quite objectionable today. The railroads were built with cheap imported labor (Chinese, Irish, etc). Their pay wasn't high. Their working conditions were abysmal and industrial accidents resulting in death or serious injury were common. This is before unions existed so workers had next to no rights. If they tried to bargain for them, they'd be crushed by hired mercenaries or bought-off police. And of course, we didn't do much of anything about industrial waste. Just dump it in the river. This was 60 years before the famous Lake Eire fire where the lake was so filled with trash and oil-based pollution that the surface of the lake literally caught fire.
JD Rockefeller was an absolute mercenary, and an arrogant, egotistical ass who claimed that God had inspired him and had granted him the right to run his competition out of business and maintain a 98% control over the world's kerosene and petroleum trade while he accumulated more wealth than more than half of the countries on Earth for himself.
Andrew Carnegie was no gem either as his safety record at his steel mills showed... and JP Morgan, the king of all the robber barons, said forget the hard work of actually producing a product of value. He took over the banking industry and bought himself his own President. So, no Zuckerberg wasn't the first to own a President. JP Morgan bought McKinley (#25).
There were a lot of abuses of the so-called golden era of capitalism because fundamentally when too much wealth and power are concentrated in any man or group of men, it will inevitably lead to corruption and abuse of that power. There are no angels. Goverment's role is to act as a referee specifically to check this kind of power. It has taken us ~150 years to learn some of these lessons, and with Big Tech and Big Pharma, we're still learning we don't have the adequate checks and balances in place yet.
Any student of history who has actually done their homework and really read on the topic should be able to tell you that the "Robber Baron" era was made possible by a lot of things we'd now find quite objectionable today. The railroads were built with cheap imported labor (Chinese, Irish, etc). Their pay wasn't high. Their working conditions were abysmal and industrial accidents resulting in death or serious injury were common. This is before unions existed so workers had next to no rights. If they tried to bargain for them, they'd be crushed by hired mercenaries or bought-off police. And of course, we didn't do much of anything about industrial waste. Just dump it in the river. This was 60 years before the famous Lake Eire fire where the lake was so filled with trash and oil-based pollution that the surface of the lake literally caught fire.
JD Rockefeller was an absolute mercenary, and an arrogant, egotistical ass who claimed that God had inspired him and had granted him the right to run his competition out of business and maintain a 98% control over the world's kerosene and petroleum trade while he accumulated more wealth than more than half of the countries on Earth for himself.
Andrew Carnegie was no gem either as his safety record at his steel mills showed... and JP Morgan, the king of all the robber barons, said forget the hard work of actually producing a product of value. He took over the banking industry and bought himself his own President. So, no Zuckerberg wasn't the first to own a President. JP Morgan bought McKinley (#25).
There were a lot of abuses of the so-called golden era of capitalism because fundamentally when too much wealth and power are concentrated in any man or group of men, it will inevitably lead to corruption and abuse of that power. There are no angels. Goverment's role is to act as a referee specifically to check this kind of power. It has taken us ~150 years to learn some of these lessons, and with Big Tech and Big Pharma, we're still learning we don't have the adequate checks and balances in place yet.