Donald Trump Channels The Robber Barons - Unbridled Ambition, Laissez-Faire, And Wealth Creation

The so-called Robber Barons of the early Twentieth Century -the great industrialists Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan- are icons of American history, responsible in large part for the creation of the great American industrial empire of steel, railroads, energy, and finance.  They had vision, ambition, will, intelligence, and a fearless sense of competition.  They brooked no comers, and worked to control and monopolize their economic investments and to expand them into other sectors of enterprise.  They were unstoppable, untouchable, and inviolate, and thanks to them America began its ascent to world power. 

Only a few times in history have such talent and remarkable creativity come together in a genius cluster.  The Founding Fathers were such cluster - how was it possible that Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, and Monroe came together at the same time?  What series of antecedents, variables, historical influences, and pure luck facilitated such an assemblage?  What factors predisposed the emergence of such Nineteenth Century Russian literary geniuses - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and others?

The Robber Barons fought hard against the demands of labor and any attempt by government to favor workers over owners.  Workers, while indispensable for the manual labor required to extract oil, build rail systems, and make steel, for industrialists were simply figures in an economic equation, pluses and minuses on a spread sheet manipulated to increase profit. 

This unfettered economic system was the engine of wealth creation.  The expansion of Vanderbilt's rail system provided thousands of jobs for the laborers who worked the line.  Carnegie's steelworks, vital for industry, employed thousands more.  The profits from their companies were invested in Morgan's banks and then invested in further economic activities. 

 

Given the nature of individual endeavor - a hardwired, ineluctable drive for survival, dominance, and control - and given the capitalist nature of the American economy, there are new titans - Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Brin, and Buffett - who have engineered the same economic revolution as their Robber Baron predecessors even while under the yoke of government surveillance and intervention. 

Economic innovation and transformation is not the result of some assemblage of workers and community organizer but the genius of the few, the unique, and the unusual.  The Robber Barons showed the way - that capitalist hunger, individual motivation, and absolute will are the sine qua non elements of economic progress.   

All of America was built this way.  What was more aggressively capitalist than the enterprise of big landowners in the South and West.  Such 'aggrandizement' led to the spread of economies of scale, mechanization, increased productivity and greater access to foodstuffs by the population.  

The West was won just as the East in the hands of Carnegie and Rockefeller was won - through will, determination and raw personal ambition.  Again, while land reforms and some measure of social support was welcomed, attempts to redefine capitalist enterprise to fit a more 'inclusive' model, is wrong-headed. 

 

Capitalists in any generation have ambition, confidence, will, vision, courage, and intelligence; and Carl Sandburg's poem Chicago said it best not only about the city he loved but about America:

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
            Bareheaded,
            Shoveling,
            Wrecking,
            Planning,
            Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
            Laughing! 

And so it is that Donald Trump will attempt to remake America - to return it to its earliest entrepreneurial roots, to rid society of neo-socialist progressivism and the ethos of wealth distribution. Through punitive regulation and taxation and uninhibited public spending, Joe Biden and his Congressional associates consolidated, expanded, and applied all the agencies of federal power to remake the country in their Utopian image.  

Heedless of the failure of Soviet-era communism and European socialism - both intended to create classless, economically equally societies - the former President pursued a policy that numbed individual enterprise, deflated personal ambition and innovation, and created a society of entitlement. 

Progressives still held to the idea that an equalizing social reform, one which transfers wealth from those who produced it to those who have not, is the best way to create their Utopian vision of social harmony, peace, and nobility.  America's early capitalists have been cancelled for their predatory injustice to the working man, their corporate greed, and trampling ambition.  Men are not supposed to act this way, and must be bound to a more compassionate, inclusive social contract.  

There is no room in America, say progressives, for the likes of Gould, Fisk, and the rest of them.  The infrastructure, wealth, and economic dominion they created was unparalleled, but instead of being credited with the founding of the modern American capitalist engine, they are dismissed, canceled, and relegated to insignificance. 

Trump unabashedly and proudly turns to these men for inspiration, example, and guidance.  They not only embody American enterprise but the most human enterprise.  Human beings have bought, sold, and bartered since the first Paleolithic settlements. They have promoted, advertised, raised or lowered prices according to supply and demand without education, training, or algorithms. Self-interest, the most hardwired trait of human nature, has always been expressed in the acquisition of land, resources, wealth, and power. 

 

Over the millennia the roughest edges of raw capitalism have been smoothed - the market operates far more efficiently when bloody conflict and the law of tooth and fang are moderated and tempered.  No one has ever succeeded in neutering aggressive self-interest, and society has learned to live with the inevitable disputes over value, territory, and ownership.  Regimes have tilted either left or right on this issue - some tending to reign in private enterprise and replace it with a more communitarian approach; others unleashing its mighty potential come what may. 

Donald Trump is among the latter.  He is a believer in the innate, hardwired self-interest of human nature, and knows that as always it has been the engine of wealth creation.  The freer enterprises are to pursue wealth and market dominance, the better off society will be.  Darwin understood this best - the survival of the fittest was no matter for arbitration or adjudication, but winners and losers in an evolutionary struggle. 

 

There is nothing wrong with recognizing, acknowledging, and feting the most productive in society - honoring them for their contributions and opening the way for them to continue.  Donald Trump, as witnessed by his Cabinet appointments is all in on capitalist enterprise and letting market forces determine outcomes.  Dirigisme, state financial dictates, and centralized planning are discredited socialist economic tools.  Supply will always respond to demand without government interference. 

A fair, equitable, objective justice system is the key to orderly economic progression. Justice recognizes free competition and the opposing forces within it, and adjudicates disputes between conflicting interests; and that is why Trump has given the reform of the Justice Department top priority.  It was used and abused by the previous administration to promote their political interests and to punish opponents, and now it must be restored to its former stature.  Free competition, government demurral, and a vigorous court system is the new ethos.