How the Myth of the 'Robber Barons' Began—and Why It Persists | Intellectual Takeout
"Capitalism Worked, But We Were Told It Didn't
We study history to learn from it.
If we can discover what worked and what didn’t work, we can use this knowledge wisely to create a better future.
Studying the triumph of American industry, for example, is important because it is the story of how the United States became the world’s leading economic power.
Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
The years when this happened, from 1865 to the early 1900s, saw the U.S. encourage entrepreneurs indirectly by limiting government.
Slavery was abolished and so was the income tax.
Federal spending was slashed and federal budgets had surpluses almost every year in the late 1800s. In other words, the federal government created more freedom and a stable marketplace in which entrepreneurs could operate.
To some extent,
during the late 1800s—a period historians call the “Gilded Age”—American politicians learned from the past.
They had dabbled in federal subsidies from steamships to transcontinental railroads, and those experiments dismally failed.
Politicians then turned to free markets as a better strategy for economic development.
The world-dominating achievements of Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab validated America’s unprecedented limited government.
And when
politicians sometimes veered off course later with government interventions for tariffs, high income taxes, anti-trust laws, and an effort to run a steel plant to make armor for war—the results again often hindered American economic progress.
Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
Why is it, then, that for so many years, most historians have been teaching the opposite lesson?
They have
made no distinction between political entrepreneurs, who tried to succeed through federal aid,
and market entrepreneurs, who avoided subsidies and sought to create better products at lower prices.
Instead,
most historians have preached that many, if not all, entrepreneurs were “robber barons.”
They did not enrich the U.S. with their investments; instead, they bilked the public and corrupted political and economic life in America.
Therefore, government intervention in the economy was needed to save the country from these greedy businessmen..."
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"In “The Wealth of Nations,” the 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith observed about the chicanery of some businessmen, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” 
Georgetown Professor: GOP Senators at Kavanaugh Hearing 'Deserve Miserable Deaths'
"The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to be worse than its diseases. 
The Gold Commitment is a promise made by DePauw University that students will have the opportunity to either continue taking classes for free or work for the university, if they are unable to immediately secure a job upon graduation.
Both of these excerpts are from a BBC website intended for the use of teachers in secular British schools.
In the first chapter of the book, Ellul describes some of the characteristics of modern propaganda. Eight of them appear below:
...How times have changed. 
