Robber Barons:In an essay in the
Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg, unhappy with the politics surrounding high gas prices,
writes: (emp add)
Why, this week, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) even conjured the specter of those old devils, the "robber barons." "Sadly," she declared with barely suppressed glee, "we are now living in a new era of robber barons." Pelosi, who is more of a student of polls and left-wing blogs than history, probably doesn't much care that the modern stereotype of the robber baron as rapacious economic predator is more a product of the collectivist spirit of the New Deal than of the 19th century. "The Robber Barons," an error-filled 1934 tract written by a socialist named Matthew Josephson, was intended to pump up Depression-plagued readers with bile about "economic royalists" blocking social progress.
This is yet another example where Goldberg has taken a policy, action, or in this case term -
that is widely used throughout history and by people of all ideological stripes, and attached it to his bogeyman: The New Deal.
Many of you who took history in high school remember learning that robber barons were part of the politics of the early 20th century, which was the era of the muckrackers and reforms championed by people like Teddy Roosevelt. "robber barons" were not the invention of fevered New Dealers looking for scapegoats. In fact, we learn this about
robber barons from Wikipedia:
Robber baron was a term revived in the 19th century in the United States as a pejorative reference to businessmen who dominated their respective industries and amassed huge personal fortunes, typically as a direct result of pursuing various allegedly anti-competitive or unfair business practices.
To repeat: Goldberg is on constant patrol for anything, no matter how obscure (a book by Matthew Josephson!), that can be used to make the New Deal look bad.
posted by Quiddity at 5/04/2006 05:52:00 AM
On another note altogether, all of a sudden I am seeing the term "theocons" thrown around.
Has this terminology been in extensive and I have just missed it?
Or is this an attempt to dilute the use of the term "neocon"?
I do agree that robber barrons existed, and still do exist if you look at the oligarchs that popped up after the disolution of the Soviet Union...
Theocon has been around for maybe up to 20 years. At least in the mid-90's the New Republic had a cover story: Neocon vs. Theocon, which discussed a potential rift between the two camps (that never happened).
The Theocons, at least back then, were often Catholic and wanted to literally remake the state so that religious entities ran the show (at least that was the ideal vision). Theocons were criticized for declaring that much of contemporary government was illegitimage. The arguments were on the lines that the government had forfeited claims of legitimacy by not stopping abortion and permitting other immoral behavior.
Jonah Goldberg opines a lot on topics he knows nothing about. In an update to my Sat. post (the one where I actually had something nice to say about Sulli), I just added something where Jonah babbles on about his brand of supply side economics demonstrating his incredible ability to prove he has never learned ANYTHING.
