Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues this Monday evening, November 4, with Don Boudreaux, former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and current professor of economics at George Mason University. 7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference, which are being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. There is also an excellent third JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!
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One of the shibboleths of progressives (i.e., “liberals” or leftists) is that they love the poor. However, the truth is more complex. Actually they only love the poor when they remain poor. If the poor get rich, they then hate them.
Consider, for example, four American multimillionaires from the Gilded Age, which is my favorite period of time in U.S. history: John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and Leland Stanford.
The left hates them. All four of them are vilified as “robber barons.” However, leftists also love them.
How is that possible?
Well, they hate them because they were rich. But they weren’t always rich. They started out poor. The left loves them when they were poor because leftists love the poor. It was because they got rich that the left began hating them. If they had remained poor instead of becoming rich, leftists would have continued loving them.
Consider Rockefeller. According to his Wikipedia page, he was “one of the wealthiest Americans of all time.” That why the left hates him and vilifies him. But Rockefeller wasn’t always rich. Wikipedia says that he was born to “con artist” William A. Rockefeller, Sr., who “worked first as a lumberman and then a traveling salesman.” John D. Rockefeller’s first job was as an assistant bookkeeper, during which he “worked long hours.”
Consider Carnegie, another one of the richest Americans ever. But he wasn’t always rich. Wikipedia: He was born in Scotland “in a typical weaver’s cottage with only one room. His father had a “successful weaving business and owned multiple looms…. When Carnegie was 12, his father had fallen on tough times as a handloom weaver. Making matters worse, the country was in starvation. His mother helped support the family by assisting her brother and by selling potted meats at her ‘sweetie shop,’ becoming the primary breadwinner.”
Consider Vanderbilt, also one of the richest people in American history. Wikipedia: “He began working on his father’s ferry in New York Harbor as a boy, quitting school at the age of 11. At the age of 16, Vanderbilt decided to start his own ferry service. According to one version of events, he borrowed $100 (equivalent to $1,900 in 2023)[7] from his mother to purchase a periauger (a shallow draft, two-masted sailing vessel).”
Consider Leland Stanford, another of the richest people in American history. According to Wikipedia, his father was “a farmer of some means” and, therefore, wasn’t extremely poor but also apparently wasn’t extremely rich either. Stanford was raised on family farms, studied law, and became a lawyer.
So, how did these four men become so wealthy? Well, keep in mind that this was the most unusual period in U.S. history, which is why it’s my favorite period from the standpoint of economic liberty. Imagine: No income tax or IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, national-security state (i.e., Pentagon, CIA, and NSA), (few) economic regulations, public schooling, foreign interventionism (except the Spanish-American War), foreign aid, drug war, immigration controls, and gun control. Like I say, the most unusual society in history, totally different from the type of society in which we live today.
Each of these men got rich by producing goods and services that other people wanted to buy. That’s how they got rich. That’s the only way to get rich in a free-market system. Since they didn’t have to pay any taxes on their income, they were able too get rich quicker.
This is one of the distinguishing characteristic of the Gilded Age. And it wasn’t just these four men who got rich. People from all walks of life were going from rags to riches in one, two, or three generations. That’s why multitudes of penniless immigrants, many of whom couldn’t speak English, were flooding into America. Remember: No immigration controls. For the first time in history, regular poor people had a chance to get rich in a society with no income tax, no welfare state, and no warfare state.
The thing about leftists is that they love all these people but only when they were poor. As soon as the poor got rich, leftists hated them. That’s one of the reasons the left ended up foisting the income tax and the welfare state on America in the 20th century — to use the force of government to “equalize” wealth by using the IRS and the income tax to “level down” the rich by taking their money and giving it to the poor. In the ideal world of the leftist, the rich would no longer be rich and instead would be poor, in which case the left would begin loving them again. That’s why the left loves Cuba, where everyone is equally poor.
Another reason for the welfare state was because, leftists claim, the rich would not voluntarily help others with their wealth and, therefore, needed to be forced to do so. Thus, leftists adopted the income tax and brought into existence the IRS to take money from the rich and give it to the poor. In that way, the government could be viewed as good, caring, and compassionate.
Except for one thing: It was a lie. When Americans were free to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, they not only helped society by producing goods and services that benefited people and raised their standards of living, they also gave away, voluntarily, extremely large amounts of their fortunes. And they didn’t do it for an income-tax deduction because remember: Our American ancestors rejected income taxation and an IRS for more than century.
The Wikipedia page on each of these people summarizes the phenomenal philanthropic activities of these four rich people (who started out as poor). Here are just a few philanthropic tidbits about these four “robber barons”:
Rockefeller: Founded the University of Chicago, voluntarily.
Vanderbilt: Founded Vanderbilt University, voluntarily.
Stanford: Founded Stanford University, voluntarily.
Carnegie: Founded Carnegie Mellon, voluntarily.