We are now, perhaps more than any time in the last century, clearly in another age of the robber barons. This is something I would imagine almost everyone on both sides of the political spectrum would agree with, although rightward folks may think this is a return to greatness.

To contrast these modern robber barons with those from the late 19th and early 20th century, we can look at Vanderbilt, Ford, Carnegie, and even Rockefeller. All of these titans of industry created things, unethically it is to be said, but they created cars, rails, steel companies, oil companies, etc. These were actual products with actual workers that needed to be paid and used in order for their products to be successful.

This leads to perhaps the most famous capitalistic instinct to emerge from these men, when Henry Ford famously wanted to pay his workers “well”, believing that when his workers could spend more he would actually make more money as they could buy more cars.

While there are obvious flaws with this argument (that I will not go into now) I wanted to say why I think that this indicates a scarier oligarch in the modern age. For back then, there was at least some incentive for the bosses to pay their workers well as this meant the worker could afford more product. In this modern age where instead of titans of industry we have titans of nothing, what product are the workers buying? Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, X, Bluesky…these are all free services. The insidious ways in which these billionares make their money is not by giving us products, but by making worse and worse services that we then have to pay to make the service better.

In other words, what incentive does Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and the others in the billionaire class have to make the worker well paid? They have none! In fact at every turn they have showed us that they want the worker to make less, and be able to do less, all in service of their portfolio growing.

Ultimately, just as it was with Teddy Roosevelts government, it is up to the people and a democratically elected government to reign in these billionaires. This is perhaps obvious to some, the stakes are higher than when Teddy Roosevelt went after the large companies of his day. There will be no rich benefactors. There will be no gifts from the wealthy. We are on our own until we decide to use the government to limit the abilities of these corporations to buy our political officials and continue to make our lives worse.

And they do make our lives worse.

– TMR