The robber barons

What Hacker News says

1. 40acresJan 2019
   Thanks for the recommendation, I've been looking for books like this to better understand today and what our future might look like. I'm currently wrapping up The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson and it's a really solid read.
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2. WalterBrightSep 2017
   > The Jungle is a piece of historical fiction that was accurate while remaining fictional

   If a historian says that The Jungle is factual, then he should be able to cite facts and would not need to cite a novel. It's really poor scholarship to cite a novel as a factual source. There's no way to tell what parts of it are factual and what are "artistic license". The book has neither footnotes nor references.

   I own probably close to a thousand history books, and no, history books are not written as novels. They do tend to tell a story, and they sometimes have an agenda, but they all have footnotes and references where there facts came from, and they make it possible for the reader to distinguish the verifiable facts from the historian's opinion.

   > Are you, a Libertarian, proposing that the government spend years and millions of dollars creating a U.S. official definition of "juice" for labeling purposes?

   The government does now. I don't see a problem with it, nor anything unlibertarian about it.

   > What happens when inevitably companies skirt the line?

   They get charged with fraud.

   > What if I'm a company that produces milk but I cut corners and possibly some number of milk products happen to be poisonous, though I never try to poison anything?

   That's called negligent homicide. There's nothing libertarian about condoning negligent homicide. No libertarian suggests that nobody will commit crimes under a free market.

   And so on for your other examples.

   > the freedom to do all of the above with even more impunity than they do now.

   I'm afraid you've been misinformed.

   To give an example of regulations that libertarians would oppose - rent control.

   If you want to impugn capitalism, may I suggest "The Robber Barons" by Josephson. Josephson seems to share your viewpoint, and he wrote an actual history book of capitalism of the period, complete with an index, sources, quotations, footnotes, all the good stuff. I have complaints with his conclusions, and I think he cherry-picked his facts to fit his viewpoint, but you'd be on much more solid ground than with Sinclair.

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3. kennywinkerNov 2019
   Also an aside: I started reading that article... I was giving it a fair shake (tho generally finding it unconvincing), until I encountered this sentence:

   > The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University

   In what world is his being jewish relevant to the article, except to dog-whistle anti-semetic protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion conspiracy bs? Disgusting.

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