Sunday, December 28, 2014

Crony Capitalist/Robber Baron Yes/No?


1) John D. Rockefeller - no.......2) Steve Jobs - no.......3) Robert Fulton - yes.......4) Ken Lay - yes.......5) Dick Cheney - yes.......6) Cornelius Vanderbilt - no.......7) Andrew Carnegie - no.......8) Edward Collins - yes.......8) Al Gore - yes.......9) The Cornells - yes.......10) Bill Gates - no.......11) Thomas Durant - yes.......12) Leland Stanford - yes.......13) Andrew Mellon - no.......14) Grenville Dodge - yes.......15) The Scrantons - no.......16) James J. Hill - no.......17) Jeffrey Imnelt - yes.......18) Charles Schwab - no..................................................................................And the criteria is very simple, folks. The real capitalists (those that were awarded with a yes) created hundreds of thousands of jobs, innovated (bringing new goods and services to the market), brought the cost of living down for everyone, and did all of these things without government assistance. The phony/crony capitalists (political entrepreneurs is what historian, Burton Folsom, calls them) - well, let's just say that they basically made themselves wealthy while ripping off both their customers AND the taxpayer........................................................................................P.S. The guy on the bottom - he's actually reaching for YOUR wallet, bra.

8 comments:

Jerry Critter said...

It seems from your title that a yes means you are a crony capitalist/robber baron, not a real capitalist.

dmarks said...

"... and did all of these things without government assistance...."

Gates and Jobs don't come across entirely clean here, you know. Microsoft and Apple had/have massive government contracts. Sometimes not the best deal for the government, too. Often exclusive. Or in the case of Macs in schools for many years: the computers from Apple cost many times more than more reasonable alternatives, and did a lot less.

This might apply to some of the others, as well. But I'm not going in that deep.

The point being that these two guys (companies) have had close and lucrative contracts with government bodies in the US worth billions.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

You're on the case, Jerry.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

You may have a point there, dmarks. I would just point out that the government also persecuted Mr. Gates on a trumped up anti-trust charge and that that probably cost him a shitload of cash.......Also, were these contracts bid or no-bid?

Rusty Shackelford said...



Let the market rule....he who does it the best...the fastest...with the lowest cost wins....as it should be....

BB-Idaho said...

IMO, Gates 'obtained' DOS and
"borrowed' Windows. The basic
work was done by others. His success was in providing a user-friendly screen by sacrificing
concise code with sloppy code, which required ever larger RAM
(the MS paperclip icon used more
code than the NASA astrophysical
nav onboard computer on the moonshot) One consequence is that
the free (and better) competitor
linux
is preferred by many in science,
education, government, industry world-wide. That doesn't make him a robber baron, just clever.

dmarks said...

You are right about the harassment of Microsoft. And that was spearheaded by David Boeis.... the same man involved with the effort to disenfranchise an entire state in 2000.

dmarks said...

Better in some ways, not others. The Betamax of OS' s? I don't use Linux because most of the stuff I want to run won't run on it.

But that might change. New versions of Windows become more and more impossible to use. Windows 8 only becomes tolerable by adding a patch to force it to be like XP.

"Improvements" such as breadcrumbs and getting rid of search make things that took a split second on old slow machines take many minutes on new lightning - fast boxes.

Linux is less prone to some idiot in an ivory corporate tower breaking it. And breaking it is all Microsoft has done since going off the cliff starting with Vista.