Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

Author:Chrystia Freeland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781594204098
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Published: 2012-10-11T07:00:00+00:00

Bringing this dream to life required the robber barons: “To be made real, it required use of the talents of men of tremendous will, and tremendous ambition, since by no other force could the problems of financing and engineering and new developments be brought to a consummation,” the president explained.

But FDR was also firmly of the view that the interests of these talented “men of tremendous will and tremendous ambition” didn’t perfectly coincide with those of society as a whole:

So manifest were the advantages of the machine age, however, that the United States fearlessly, cheerfully, and, I think, rightly, accepted the bitter with the sweet. It was thought that no price was too high to pay for the advantages which we could draw from a finished industrial system. The history of the last half century is accordingly in large measure a history of a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used. The financiers who pushed the railroads to the Pacific were always ruthless, often wasteful, and frequently corrupt; but they did build railroads, and we have them today. It has been estimated that the American investor paid for the American railway system more than three times over in the process; but despite this fact the net advantage was to the United States.

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