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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (10658)	2/2/2006 4:37:36 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541965

It seemed to just be trying to say that the Robber Barons were misunderstood. I would put it as "the Robber Barons" did a lot of good. That doesn't mean that they didn't act unethically or even illegally at times. It doesn't mean that some of their actions where not harmful. But they did serve an important function and often there net effect was more positive than negative. I don't think that function was primarily having a lot of money to spend. The way they made the money was more important. A lottery winner isn't going to create new products or services, or open up markets to competition, or create more efficient ways to provide the products or services. The "robber barons" often didn't have durable monopolies (unless they could get the state to support a monopoly), and when they did have a near monopoly it was normally by being able to charge a lot less. They where more often like Wal-Mart (except Wal-Mart isn't a near monopoly) in that they used economies of scale to drive down prices, than they where ossified protected monopolists who drove up prices and massively hurt consumers.