It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth.
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The huge integrated corporations of the Robber Barons called for armies of paper wranglers.
Once lauded as figures to be emulated, men like Rockefeller and Carnegie are now only robber barons.
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By any measure, the new billionaires of Silicon Valley and Wall Street pale alongside the robber barons.
At its peak, the excess profits tax ran to 90% for the Robber Barons who didn't complain too vociferously.
The Robber Barons slowly withdrew from the scene to enjoy their great fortunes and redeem their tarnished images with good works.
While many of the surviving Upper East Side mansions of the robber barons have been repurposed, New York has no shortage of desirable addresses.
They are not operating in a healthy free-market system but in a culture of corruption, with government and business robber barons robbing the people blind.
In fact, capitalism entails neither robber barons nor kings nor obsequious serfs but independent beings who trade the products of their effort to mutual advantage.
The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era of tough laws and court actions against Robber Barons who controlled state legislatures and Congress with their anti-trust legislation.
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Rather than avenging angels protecting the American consumer from harm, opportunistic plaintiffs can easily become 21st century robber barons looking to pad their bottom lines and crush their opposition.
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The nearest parallel is with Teddy Roosevelt, who sought to reform the institutions of government at the turn of the century, taking on both the robber barons and the trade unions in the process.
It was often said that enlightened self-interest would push Russia's robber barons, like their American counterparts in the last century, into seeing the merits of a properly enforceable legal framework to regulate both business and politics.
Russians have a deep suspicion of rich and successful people a suspicion nurtured by communism and reinforced by the oligarchs of the 1990s, who owed their wealth to political connections and acted like Soviet caricatures of capitalist robber barons.
On the other side stand the lesson of history (even the robber barons' generosity did not avert a backlash) and the fact that few of the new rich seem to be aware that they are doing anything questionable at all.
Business entities and their leaders have always been inseparable to some extent, yet not even in the age of the robber barons has public interest, spurred by mass and now digital communications, been so riveted by the personalities of corporate kingpins.
In the second tier, the hustler class of new-money industrialists produced a first generation of Robber Barons, and then an asymmetric balance of power between bankers and second-generation hustlers who aspired to Robber Baron level fortunes (egged on by Horatio Alger narratives), but ended up as the tame new middle class.
And while no mind-boggling fortunes like those of Rockefeller and Carnegie were created by this second-tier (those levels would not be reached again until the Bill Gates era), the wealth that was created was nothing to sneeze at (and was much larger, in aggregate, than the wealth created for and by the Robber Barons in the nineteenth century).
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