Class warfare summed up in a simple joke (with an accompanying cartoon)

OK, how many?

I'd argue that Frick was the one who was much more interested in breaking the unions. He's the one who lead the battle against the Homestead strikers while Carnegie was away in Scotland. It's unclear to me that Carnegie was even aware to what lengths Frick would go to break the strike.

But, I will agree it's not always black and white.

Some people on the left need to learn that as well.

I don't think the Koch brothers have been accused of killing anyone.

 

Seven Amalgamated strikers, right? And a couple of Pinkertons?

And nobody kept a count of the dead Chinese along the railroad.

Of course you're right - Koch probably hasn't knowingly killed anybody. But like Rockefeller or Gates or Ford or Walton, you wonder in the end what was the true cost of creating all that wealth. And who actually paid most dearly for it, and what alternative futures were foreclosed because of it.

 

27 people died building the Brooklyn Bridge. Does that make Roebling a bad guy or a murderer.

I don't think Carnegie ever intended for anyone to die at Homestead and I think the events changed him forever. It ruined his relationship with Frick and he spent much of the rest of his life trying to redeem himself.

 

Frick was Carnegie's man. Plenty of historians argue that Carnegie knew exactly what Frick was doing. Hence his absence in Scotland at the critical moment.

The Roebling comparison doesn't really hold. He didn't order his hired goons to shoot any of his own muckers or diggers. They were workers who knowingly undertook dangerous work, and were compensated for doing so.

The Chinese on the other hand were a disposable necessity of railroad building, like ties or spikes or shovels, and were buried along the roadbed as they dropped or were blown up.

No creation without destruction, certainly, but there's a balance to be kept.

 

You could be right about Carnegie. He was away at a time he knew would be critical. I just don't think he thought that Frick would go as far as he did.

I'd have to read more about the Brooklyn Bridge deaths, but do you know if they were skilled craftsman who died or were they unskilled laborers?

And, I get your point in general. Industrialists are/were not perfect and are/were flawed in many ways.

I think it's a little unfair to judge some of the ones from the past by today's standards.

And, I think it's unfair to compare the Kochs or Gates to the robber barons of yesterday.

 

Back to the joke at the start of this thread ...

It seems that in several instances the discussion has centered on the question as to what's fair with regard to allocation of the cookies. That, to me, is beside the point. I am more interested in this question: What allocation of this batch of cookies leads to there likely being another (perhaps bigger) batch some day?

 

19th century 'sandhogs' were not necessarily what we'd refer to as 'skilled.' They are, however, a class of workers who take great pride in what they do. The caisson workers on the Brooklyn Bridge were the first generation of these men.

As to Koch or Gates and unintended consequences: Mr. Koch is a cancer survivor. Part of his wealth comes from the production of chemicals. What if his $100m gift to research reveals a link between chemical manufacture and environmental cancer clusters?

And to dq's point, are the ingredients needed for the baking of cookies infinite? Or fixed?

 

jr jr the plagiarist czar
If you copy a word
He'll call you a turd.

 

Pretty sure this is plagiarism.

 

As in the joke, I'm using the cookies to represent the output of a production process. The output reflects a variety of inputs -- labor, capital, raw materials, technology, etc. While the yield from a particular input might be fixed in the very short run, it is often the case that over time, refinement of the process leads to its being more productive -- we get a more attractive output-to-input ratio. How the outputs are allocated can shape whether this happens, since the promise of future allocations can serve to spur the improvement. Even if the process doesn't become more productive, however, how its outputs are allocated shapes whether it will remain in operation; if a supplier of a particular input becomes dissatisfied with his/her allocation, the withdrawal of that input shuts the process down.