May 2, 2023

 A free country will always have its robber barons.  But not all such barons are equal.  Nor are they all equally bad — or good.

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The title was not meant to be a compliment when it was first given to the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the late 19th century.  Curiously, it has not been attached at all to today’s Big Tech barons.  And yet they are worse, maybe even far worse, than their counterparts of long ago.  This is true for many reasons, far from the least of which is that their impact has been to make this country less free. 

All our barons have benefited from operating in a country grounded in political and economic freedom.  But only our modern Big Tech barons have used their power to police, and yes, rob individuals of individual thoughts with one click, while producing herdlike thinking and behavior with another.  In the process, they have also helped diminish America as a unique beacon of freedom in the world.

Today’s tech barons — Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and the like — are much more powerful, much more insidious, and much more dangerous than their counterparts of long ago.  They are also just as willing as any Rockefeller to crush their competitors and just as committed as any Carnegie to controlling their workers.

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More than that, they are also willing to do the bidding of America’s enemies.  Witness Apple’s kowtowing to the “request” of the Chinese communist regime that it shut down communication among Hong Kong anti-regime protesters.

In this country they seem far more interested in cooperating with one major political party than the other.  Witness the Zuckerberg “investment” of hundreds of millions in the 2020 election, less to bolster American democracy than to assure a Democrat party victory.

What to do, given the clout and predilections of our current robber barons?  Ironically, maybe the best answer would be to reverse the course of action taken by the original progressives in their attempt to rein in the original robber barons.

There is little doubt that those barons presented a serious challenge to our founding constitutional order of limited government and divided powers.  In fact, so serious was this challenge that both major parties developed reform-minded progressive wings.  And yet over the course of the past century those bipartisan progressive reforms have played a major role in further upending that original constitutional order.      

Our first progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, was convinced that something had to be done about the “wealthy criminal class.” Despite his trust-busting reputation, TR’s real emphasis was on building up the state rather than on breaking down the trusts. 

Good Darwinian that he was, Republican Roosevelt assumed that evolution toward bigness in business and government was both inevitable and ultimately beneficial.  In addition, he presumed that a progressive federal bureaucracy would always be staffed and run by politically disinterested experts. Democrat President Woodrow Wilson essentially agreed, thereby giving the progressive agenda an additional bipartisan sheen.