Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of call it like I see it, we're gonna continue our streaming between the Lines series and discuss the Gilded Age, the 2018 documentary directed by Sarah Colt. It's a PBS documentary. This nearly two and a half hour film takes a look at the late 19th century period in the US following the rapid industrialization of the nation and also where the wealth of the nation just exploded. And, you know, one of the defining characteristics also being where the gap between those with the wealth and those without the wealth also exploded.
The documentary discusses many of the key people and events during this period and does a good job of showing why it was an exciting time as far as progress from an industrial standpoint and urbanization. The age is properly described as a gilded age because, as the subtitle suggests, gilded is not golden.
Joining me today is a man who's been grinding hard trying to start his own personal gilded age. Tunde yogon, Lana Tunday. How's the chase four millie going these days, man?
[00:01:28] Speaker B: You're not supposed to put my business out there. Should be telling everybody where I'm going with my goals.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Come on.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Now I'm gonna sound like one of these robber barons we're about to talk about.
Now I'm gonna sound hypocritical.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. There you go. No recording is but everybody.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: He's right. I am trying to get to my gilded situation.
We'll do a show in ten years and see how that worked out for me.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: The check in. Yeah, there you go. Now, we're recording this on November 7, 2023. And I want to jump right into our discussion. So, Tunde, to get us started, one of the defining characteristics of the gilded age was the huge accumulation of wealth and power by a small number of people. So what were your thoughts on some of the factors that, you know, either discussed in the documentary or just that you're aware of that led to or allowed for these huge accumulations of wealth?
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question, and it was a great documentary. I recommend everyone watching this do take a look after seeing us here, because I think watching those kind of documentaries and getting this type of education about the historic similarities today would actually help a lot of us in processing where our society is today and how we got here, because I'm going to look at some of my notes, looking at my notes on how you got to this point in the american experience, where by the 1890s into the early 20th century, you have a greater imbalance, actually, of wealth disparity than we do today. As much as we know and believe, and I know we'll discuss later that there are, we're kind of revisiting some of those imbalances right now. But if you look at it, a lot of the factors that led into it, I mean, you got the way the nation expanded post civil war.
There were a lot of, the country was very regional at the time, still in terms of regional economies, but it really was a technology of the railroad that seems to have been what kind of created the mass economy of the United States so that it was no longer regional players.
You had the ability of industrialists to begin to bring together the resources from around the country, how you had copper and destruction. That's what I was going to say, to bring these resources together, because the country, there's one thing we're very lucky in the United States is we have a vast geography. So they were talking about coal coming in from Wyoming, copper coming in from other parts of the country, like your home area of Ohio. They talked about the production of food. And what happened is those were all really limited to the local areas because there was no mass transportation yet. But once the railroad really took off, by the late 18 hundreds, all of these resources could be brought into factories and then used to create things like steel and other goods and services that were able to then be pushed back out in the manufacturing world. So you had manufacturing that was being sold to Americans and then sold to Europeans and the overseas markets. So that's what created this ability for a few to really ramp up and be able to control a lot of wealth.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I mean, what, to me, what really stands out about that? Like, we can get into, and I know you're going to want to touch on, like, you know, like the government action or inaction with tax codes, things like that regulation or lack thereof. But one of the, I think just on a fundamental level, what we're looking at is we had these industries that weren't mature, so there were industries that were new. And when these industries are new, basically the, when they're mature industries, there's a lot of major players, and they're all jockeying for relative position, but they, the market is relatively split up between major players. It's not like there's one person, and then that's it. And then, you know, it's, there's a status quo, so to speak. But when the railroad comes out of nowhere or when the steel and, or the oil, you know, if you want to, you know, look at standard or whatever, the oil industry comes out of nowhere or the steel industry comes out of nowhere, then the first movers or, you know, the early movers with the best processes can, you can create these big winners and there aren't other behemoths that they're competing with already, you know, so they can get these big ones. So just fundamentally when you have, and this mirrors, you know, in a sense like the Internet age, you know, where it was nothing and then it was something and then it's like, okay, yeah, there is Amazon and they're just a behemoth. Even though there were a lot, there were a lot of people that, you know, could have been in there. Could have, should have, would have. But Amazon was an early mover. They did it really well and they just became so huge. And so in that, and when we're looking at the gilded age, it was like that. But with railroads, with things like steel, you know, like the building blocks of how all these cities were getting built and these resources or these means of production and these industries were controlled by small groups of people. And so that's how you end up with the huge winners, so to speak, versus if you go 50 years down the road, then, you know, there's several, they might be several steel companies and they're all, oh, this company might inch ahead a little bit and then these people might change something and they come back up a little bit. But they're all big, they're all established, you know. And so here when you jump in, there's nobody established. You can have a really big winner or so, you know, in each industry.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And we'll get to the point also later in the conversation as to how it became, like you said, 50 years later, there were several competitors because that's not a natural.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that won't happen naturally.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: And I know that when we get to talking about Mister Morgan, we can talk about that. But you bring up some good points because one thing to say, because this is where I think we got to look at all sides of these kind of things. And it's very interesting because the robber barons, and rightfully so in many examples do kind of get beat up a little bit in history as relates to things like their relationship with labor.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: And Robert Barrett talking about are these, these big winners in certain industries?
[00:07:43] Speaker B: You know, like they specifically cite several, I kind of like the way they went down this because they cite like Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie, they cited who was.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Big, you know, it was the big guy in steel.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Yep. And then misses Vanderbilt, the daughter in law of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was the socialite. So they did a good job bringing into.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: But Vanderbilt, the name, you know, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Yeah, the man with railroads. Yeah, yeah. But what I'm getting at is they didn't just touch on the money part and the capitalist part and the industrialist part. They also talked on, touched on the socialite part, which was very important, because they made it some good points that America was such a young country at the time. You're talking maybe 100 years old by the late 18 hundreds, that we didn't have an aristocratic kind of hierarchy from the past like the Europeans did, where they had.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: Well, it's a young country, but remember, it's not just like when the country starts, it's a young culture in general, because even forget how long old the country was, just people hadn't been here in nature.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Culture. Yeah.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: That's one distinguish between. It's not necessarily the age of the country, it's just the old school people had been here, their people had been here for 300 years or 200 years, whereas in Europe, it's like thousands of years where you have these families or something like that, of prominence.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So they make a good point in explaining and tracking the lives of the women and the. Sorry, the lives of the wives, I should say, who were women of the. Of the industrialists, because they. Because they basically said it was the wives and kind of the women, that culture that created the new aristocracy in America through the socialites and that type of community. And they get into the whole thing between the young Vanderbilt and misses Astor, who Astor was the old money of the time. So it's very interesting that it reminded me a lot of that part of the documentary of, let's say, like, kind of the new money and technology today, that it seems very gaudy and flashy. Or the old money of today, I would say the Vanderbilt family of today and the Rockefeller types of today are the old money. So they're much more measured and reserved with their wealth than, let's say, the Elon Musk or the Jeff Bezos, who have to buy the biggest yachts in the world or send a Tesla car to space.
Yeah. Like, using their money to kind of flash it. It's interesting to learn that it was the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, and all that there were the new money back then and seen as kind of the. God, they talked about the big mansion she built in New York, and this need to kind of show off your wealth. And so that's what I found interesting is a lot of dissimilar patterns, because in the end, it's, how do people behave when they're in these positions? And that really hasn't changed. The technology's changed, but how people behave in these situations has not. Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: I mean, and that's because even with the Vanderbilt, the story, the particular Vanderbilt person they spoke, focused on, I believe, was a daughter in law of.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. The wife of one of the children.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So how that. And that gets into, you know, kind of the economic system that, from a governmental and regulatory standpoint, where at the time, one of the things was noted was, there's no income tax, corporate tax, estate tax, all of that stuff is not there. So it was once Cornelius Vanderbilt made all this money, it was a given that all of his kids were gonna have, you know, like, all. There was no mechanism for that money ever to leave the family, so to speak, automatically, unless it's just them making more investments and so forth. So it. It was money. That money was gonna stick there, basically. And, you know, like, I think that that's the type of mechanisms that we see today. Now, one of the things that you gotta keep in mind, and I'm glad you brought that up, because the United States. One of the things the founding fathers emphasized was that we weren't supposed to have an aristocracy like there was supposed to be. It was supposed to be a nation of equals. You know, all men are created equal, yada, yada, yada. That stuff wasn't there just in the abstract. They were objecting to systems they saw in Europe, where you. You had nobility, so to speak, built from hundreds of thousands of years or whatever. Hundreds of years, thousands of years, whatever, where there's this fan, these families that control everything, and merit basically didn't come into play in a lot of ways in the society, so they tried to build a society without that. But to your point, as you start having. As you start having in your market system, people jockeying, winning winners and losers and so forth, and you start having people rise up, this just seems to be how people act, you know? So while the founding fathers are trying to set it up where, okay, no, no, no. We're not going to have this kind of, you know, aristocrat system or aristocratic system that they have in Europe. It still evolves, so to speak, once, you know, you start having, you know, like, the new money comes in. Hey, yeah, we want to be. We want people. Not only are we rich, but we want people to look at us as the elites, so to speak. And so we're going to act a certain way. So it's very interesting to me in that sense that, yeah, even though that was the intention, you know, it's written and, you know, whether Thomas Jefferson, whoever, you want to look at where it's like, yeah, we don't want that stuff, but it comes anyway, and it comes kind of organically, you know, and the only question is whether the system has some way to regulate that or whether that's just going to continue to double down and build on itself.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's, that's, you know, if you really, let's peel it back now to going back to like, when we did the show on the book sapiens, if we go back all the way back for like the 10,000 years of or eight 8500 years of recorded kind of human civilization history, it's the technology that, that has really changed in the last 200 years. I mean, we've talked about this in various conversations that, you know, had we lived a thousand years ago, literally in the year 1023, our great grandfather's life wouldn't have been that much different than our grandchild's life in terms of, you know, each one would have been wielding a sword and a bow and arrow or something like that. You know, the technology changed pretty much.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: The same kind of way. Getting your clothes pretty much the same kind of way. Like, it's.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: And even if we go to your point, at first, you could say that the societies were structured in very similar ways around the world. It was either believing in some kind of deity as the leader or king.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Yeah. But also getting entertainment in the same kind of a way, because that's something that's very different in terms of that.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that's what I'm getting at. It's part of what I realized in reading this was the beginning of the 19th century was very similar to much of the prior centuries. Let's say the year 1800.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: You know, there was no trains yet. The people were still farming generally every, like we said at the beginning of this discussion, right. That the economies were very local. And think about by the year 1900, I mean, basically, you know, the automobiles pretty much been invented. The airplane was.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: And trains were obviously everywhere. I think they said by 1880, there was like 70,000 miles of track laid across the United States. And this is the changes that it created. They talked about the quadrupling of the population in the United States west of the Mississippi just in like a 15 year period. In one generation, then you get to the other factors of the boom in the immigrant class. So they talked about how between 1880 and 1885, three and a half million immigrants came from eastern Europe, and that was three times the amount in the prior five years, from 1875 to 1880. So you had all that border back then, huh? Yeah, no comment. That's a different show. But no, but so you had all that migration out west where there was the land and the opportunity and all that. And then you also had the beginning of the great migration of blacks from the south. So you had all of this technology leading to people being able to move. And it said that how young people could just hop a train car and go to where the jobs were, which were in the city.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: So, yeah, it's the interesting urbanization, you know, like, that's that urbanization aspect of that era.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. It's very interesting how the technology creates such prevalence of change. And then to the point you're making, the reason I bring it up is, yes, it's almost like the founding fathers, just like all in all generations, and we see it today.
There's a lot of people that are idealist and opine for this time when we're going to have this great utopia and these great balances worked out between the haves and have nots and all that. And I think a theme that you and I have begun on recent conversations is this idea that we need to stop fantasizing that there's a finish line between these forces, because to your point, that's a natural reaction. When people who amass capital have a chance to hoard it, they will, period. And so that's where I think, you know, and I'll hand it back to going to the next. How do we go from, what were the mechanisms that changed some of this stuff?
[00:16:31] Speaker A: Well, but also, though, like then this was mentioned in the documentary that the founding fathers also, and this is going to be why you, there's always going to be change. The founding fathers, what they envisioned was in large part a much more agrarian society. Now, there was, you know, like there were cities and so forth at that time, and that was a part of it, you know, the cities and, you know, part of the divide between Hamilton and Jefferson and terms of where there was the nation where we catering more towards the agrarian or more towards the, the urban, you know, type of thing. So there was a debate there, but basically the character of the nation still was defined by people out in, you know, out in space, you know, more people lived out in rural areas than lived in the cities. But in the 18 hundreds, that's, that flips. And so then you have all these people in the cities. And so the vision of the founding fathers at that point was outdated. And so it wasn't that, like their intentions might have been one way, but the mechanisms they put in place were not going to necessarily work in the same way. Once the nature of the economy and the nature of the society changed from this kind of dispersed situation to a more concentrated situation. From both a population standpoint and a wealth standpoint, not only did people get more closer, get closer together, but the wealth got held by less and less people. You know, so you have these concentrations. And so that throw, that will throw the balance off that even they tried to strike, even if, you know, and again, to your point, even if they did strike the balance and everything stayed the same, which things wouldn't stay the same? It still would. There's things would still wouldn't just play out like that forever. But, so, but I do want to ask you, you know, like, along those lines, when you have these concentrations of wealth, you know, what stood out to you as far as how that warps not only politics, but also society, you know, like, and we, like, there were examples given and everything like that in terms of how this just changes how it changes how a democratic society can operate. It changes how, you know, just, it changes how the market, you know, the market, the economic market system works, everything. So what stood out to you about that?
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it's fascinating because you're right. I mean, this technology forced society to change in such a big way. And it's amazing as you're saying it, I'm realizing you're right. Let's say between the 1780s and 1800, that when the country, you know, the constitution, all these documents and the way we're going to run our society were being put together did not exist. So the ability to imagine that you would have in such a short period of time, in less than 100 years, from that point, like we said, 70,000 miles of track, laid out the ability to bring these resources in terms of natural resources that were the foundation of them building new materials like steel and all these other things that could.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Let me give a specific example that they gave a specific example in the documentary I thought was really illustrate. Like, it illustrated it very well. The, like, if you're in 1800, for example, you need shoes. You go to the local shoe person. And so that local shoe person, there may be several, but they do. They may do very well for their, their area. But once you have the railroad and so forth, you can have national shoe companies that make it, you know, very cheaply, you know, mass produced shoes and then ship them out, you know, like using the trains all around. And so therefore they can, it's kind of like the Walmart, you know, Walmartization, you know, that we saw in the United States 20 years ago, where instead of having all these local interests that are serving their local community, you start having a few national interests. Or, you know, like I said, when it, when it first starts, you might just have one. And this national interest and they're undercutting from a price standpoint, everybody. And so you end up with, again, that that's how instead of having 30 spread across 30 cities, shoemakers that all do pretty well, you have one in one city and he just making all the shoe money, you know, and all those other guys are out of business. It's a huge, you know, accumulation.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's a great point. And so, and that actually is a great point. Right. We're there because we can move on to. That explains really how these guys become monopolies over time and how the wealth kind of siphons up to them over this period of a few decades. Because to your point, that's a great example in the small town. I mean, it's kind of what has continued to happen if we.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Yeah, Walmart, this happened in the nineties.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: That's what I was gonna say is, is in our lifetime. It's the Home Depot's, Lowe's and Walmarts that killed the general store in the small towns or the, or the local hardware store type of thing. So again, that's what I'm saying is that it seems like the last 200 years of human history has been much different than prior because the technology to create and hoard resources, this is a great example you give because a lot of people, it's hard to understand and see all this, but it's an easy explanation when you talk about the shoemaker. Because think about it, the shoemakers might have been in Kansas doing very well because a lot of people need shoes in Kansas, wherever the ability to show up.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: And if there's no other shoemaker, you're good.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Yeah, but the ability of Carnegie to control the railroads, him and Vanderbilt, JP Morgan to finance maybe the bigger shoe company on the east coast where there's a huge factory, right, and they can make maybe a 1 million shoes a month versus, and out compete the smaller guys in the midwest who can't make that many. They can, because they can make it with economies of scale. They can sell the shoes cheaper. Right. But in order to make those shoes in the big factory in the northeast, what do you need? You need labor. And I think that's where you see the beginnings also of the labor movements, because they did a very good job in the documentary saying, this was the first period of human history where labor actually, the workers sold their labor to different employers. It wasn't serfdom. It wasn't, you're working for a king. But then on the flip side, without what we have today, which is regulated kind of labor relations, the industrialists were looking to buy the labor for the cheapest they could. And so that's what created these working conditions where we had children working in factories for 12 hours. And the beginning of this thing where workers are saying, well, hold on, we're being kind of manipulated to mass produce all these things at low wages and enough safe places and we're not sharing in the spoils of all this. And this is when you started to really have, for the first time in human history, kind of labor really starting to speak up and begin to look at how do we get our foot into the political arena to begin to jockey for our own representation? Because at the time, remember, they said the big question was, is government there to represent the wealthy, or are they there to represent the growing prosperity of everyone in the society? And those are arguments we still have today because I thought of corporations are people ten years, you know, 1314 years ago in the presidential debate.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: So this, again, there's no finish line. This is a constant kind of back and forth with our society.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And really what brought that to the head at that era is that's when you have masses of people, like people everybody, or when lots of people, I should say, because it's not. It's never everybody. But when you have the majority of people living rurally, then they're more self sustaining, you know, like they, they grow stuff, they eat that stuff and so forth. They're not as dependent on. And that's the biggest change with this era, is that you had masses and masses of people who are dependent on a paycheck for survival. You know, if that paycheck doesn't hit or if they don't get their paycheck, it's not like, you know, like they, they all, well, we'll just have to eat. We only grow potatoes. We can't trade our potatoes. So we just got eat potatoes all year. Like, it's not, it's like, no, you have nothing if you don't get that paycheck. So it changed the character of where the, we're working people and, you know, people who, you know, the non capitalist, it changed the nature of their existence. And, and I mean, there's a lot of economic theory on that. You know, David Ricardo, you know, like, you go into the iron law of wages, just that wages are always going to go towards just sustenance. Like, it's not going to if without other mechanisms, it's going to be, you know, the wages are going to continue to get depressed down. And so what we see is this, the, that happening in real life, you know, like, so what was the standard was typically six days a week, 12 hours a day, you know, is what, you know, people were working for. And, you know, and it wasn't for wages that were going to lead to a comfortable life, you know, so to speak. And that tension, you know, there was a really interesting quote and, you know, like where I'm going to, I'm going to give the, the essence of it, so to speak. But, and what it talked about is kind of the, when you look at it from a governance standpoint, there's this inherent tension between democracy and capitalism. And I don't think this intention myself personally, I just editorialize myself. I don't think this tension is fatal or anything like that. Like, it's good actually to have some tension between things sometimes because that helps help. It can help bring balance if the tension is leveraged correctly. But the tension being is that the essence of democracy is equality. You know, one man, one vote, so to speak. And the essence of capitalism is inequality. The more wealth you have, the more power you have, the more capital you have. I mean, that's big bank, take little bank.
That's the essence of capitalism. So you have these two systems operating together. And so how then does, how does your government that's supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people respond? Because on one hand, they're responding to votes. And so, you know, you, one man, one vote, you need, you know, you have to respond to that. But on the other hand, capital controls a lot of things, and capitalism is the economic engine that's driving a lot of what we would see as progress. And so that tension, basically what we saw in the gilded age is that that tension was resolved decidedly over and over again. It was resolved decidedly in favor of the capitalists. And one other interesting thing, I'll kick it back to you in a second. But one other interesting thing to me about this is that we know once you flip into the 20th century, the 19 hundreds, you see the teddy Roosevelt of the world and talking square deal and actually starting to gain some progress. You see Sherman antitrust act, and then ultimately you get to the new deal with FDR. The struggles that began in this gilded age in terms of workers getting not even a fair shake, but just like a legitimate shake. Those lasted for 50 years or so, 40 or 30, 40, 50 years before there was any real relief. And so when you think we look at it, you know, it's like, again, we talk about sometimes, like, you live in the dash of history, and it's like that dash. There's a lot of lifetimes going on. There's a lot of struggle and a lot of living going on then. And so that's essential. That's a defining characteristic of that gilded age, is just that, yeah, man, there's a lot of people that are struggling, you know, and that are, you know, living hand to mouth, literally, you know, because. And that's the people that are working. You know, the people that are working or, you know, even more, even worse off.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: Well, remember, it took also the pain of a great depression to really, you know, finally get to get conditions for labor changed and kind of the american worker. And, and it also almost, you know, involved the coup, you know, when we talk about the Smedley Butler incidents of the early 1930s. So it's, again, a lot of similarities to today, where labor is making noise once a little bit more of the spoils of the, of the recent technological advances that have led to, like, you're saying, more capital being produced but also hoarded at the top of the system. And then, just like back then, the capital is intimidated by the pitchforks at the gates, so to speak. Right? So then what they try and do is what we just saw with January 6, just like you saw with Smedley Butler. I mean, Smedley Butler, for those listening, that's a very lesser known situation, but one can find it online, or we did a show on it some time ago.
But the idea is that capital gets insecure when labor has demands.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: And just briefly, the Smedley Butler thing is the capitalists, around the time when FDR was doing the new Deal and so forth, some of the capitalists got together and decided to try to take them out. And one of the vocal critics of FDR was Smedley Butler. And so they go to him and say, hey, we want to try to take out FDR. You know, put in, you know, we want you to be the new leader. And he turned to me so that he's Smedley Butler, isn't. We. We referenced Smedley Butler, but he's not the bad guy there. But go ahead. Go ahead.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Yeah, no, but it's great. I'm glad you did that because I know it's not a well known thing, but obviously, when people look it up, they'll be able to see this was definitely a real situation. And I think, you know, the similarity, once we learned, again, a January 6, how it was funded, you know, these weren't just people at the bottom of our society and all that. Remember, people flew in on private jets to go to the rally, the stop to steal rally of the morning of January 6. So it's a lot of the wealth class that becomes insecure once labor starts these periodic rumblings. And so one of the things that I found fascinating, I wanted to bring this up to you because you always have a great way of saying how the founding fathers kind of inserted some gems into our founding documents that may not have been able to be realized at the time of the forming of the country, but that they knew people would be able to carry forward and eventually, you know, would create a society that, you know, that the founders envisioned. So normally, we've had that discussions around equality, right? The idea that all men are created equal. And they could have said in the document, all white men are created equal, but they didn't. And the fact that they didn't allowed for the opening of equality over the hundreds of years into where we are now, where everybody legally is considered equal.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: Also, it allowed for it to happen, particularly when you get into, like get past the civil war, obviously, because that was a different, that was, that was states going back and forth. But once you get into the 19 hundreds and the 20th century smiling, remember.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: That was also about capital, right?
[00:30:15] Speaker A: Like, think about it allowed the country to evolve without large scale conflict at that time because people could, in civil rights movement, could point and say, look, this is what the founding document says. They're not saying. They're not. You don't have to change the character of the nation as it's said by the founding fathers. We're just asking for a piece of what that actually says already. So you give them an argument 200 years down the road or 150 years.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Down the road, and just real quick, it's interesting because the new technology of the cotton gin is what made that whole topic much more contentious when it came time to figure out how we're gonna deal with this. So, yeah, it's funny how technology definitely changes society, but it brings things. But no, where I was going is because I'm. That's why I wanted to bring this up with you here, because the way you explained that, I thought of it when I was preparing and watching the documentary, because I never thought of it from this angle before, but they said that, again, the language of America being the land of opportunity.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: Was used in that way. I thought that was a very kind of eloquent way it was described, because what happened is, in the late 18 hundreds, again, there was that question, is the government here to serve the wealthy? And I thought of, again, this is why. This is an ongoing societal debate. It reminded me of when me and you were kids. It was brought back in the form of trickle down economics. Right. That if we help the people at the top, if the government makes sure they're okay, it'll all fall down like snowflakes to everyone else, and everyone will be able to eat this manna from heaven. Then there's the other school of thought, which is, no. And this is where I'm getting to the land of opportunity. Being able to be used as a way to promote labor's cause is, well, no, the founding documents say that this is a land where everybody can come and make it. And so the government has an obligation to make sure that at least american doesn't have to give a handout, so to speak. And this is what I think makes America unique, this spirit of opportunity. Don't give a handout, necessarily, but at least give somebody an opportunity to succeed. So, you know, where I started thinking when I saw the documentary was about the child labor law, specifically when they said that children were working in these factories for 12 hours a day in twelve hour shifts. And I thought, well, that was the role of the government to come in and say, no, no, no, every kid in America should have an opportunity to at least get educated so they can have a better future than just this. So we're gonna regulate this now and say kids can't work below a certain age at all. And if they do work, once they're a certain age, there has to be a certain amount of hours, so they have time, if they choose, and build up a different life. So that's an example. That's what I said until seeing.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: And that's opportunity. Because in that scenario, wealthy kids wouldn't have to do that. And so they would be if without that kind of regulation, people, kids of the wealthy people, would have a leg up you know, a compounding leg up because they were able to get training for higher, correct, for higher growth, higher growth type of jobs and so forth, or higher job opportunities.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: That goes down to what is the role of a government? Right. Well, that's a good way they brought it up.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Well, it's not just what's the role of government, it's how it's going to do it. Because ultimately each of those schools of thought and I took specific note that William Jennings Bryant really did articulate this dilemma of, okay, so you want to promote growth, right? Your government wants to promote growth. What do you promote the growth. And, you know, Williams Jennings Bryan, who ran for president against McKinley, lost. But he talked about how it can either be a trickle down approach or a kind of a, you get it, make sure that it can be distributed throughout, throughout the society. Understanding that capitalism will naturally call that cause that to rise. You know, like the whole premise of capitalism is that you invest money and then more money will come to the money you invested. You get a return on investment. That is money coming up through the system. And everybody gets to eat as the money goes up through the system. And, you know, so ultimately it falls apart. In my personal view, if you don't have a way to get the money back down so they can come back up again, if it just stays up there, then, you know, like that's, that doesn't work. But, but the theory of trickle down economics is that, oh no, if it stays up there, then it'll naturally trickle back down. Now it's an ultimate question, though, is how to distribute the spoils. Like society has productivity, you know, like we put in just on a rudimentary level. You have $10 in wood, you have dollar 20 in labor, and you create a table that costs dollar 50. That's dollar 20 that was created right there. How do you distribute that? You know, and so how do you. Societies have been wrestling with that, particularly now we're talking about industrial societies where we're creating things on a large scale. That's been the wrestling match, so to speak, labor and capitalist labor. Is it just, we're going to keep pushing. You got $20 of labor for. Okay, we're doing good. All right. Now it's $18 of labor. Now it's $16 of labor. Or is, should. If the table goes from fifty dollars to sixty dollars, should the labor cost go up to $30 or something like that? So how we're distributing that stuff is the fundamental question. And a lot of, you know, a lot of efforts going in to persuade one way or the other. But the thing that really stands out to me about this is that capital and people in the capital class are energized by more, by their financial well being. Like, they will vote, they will participate politically, reliably, based on their political well being. But it seems like working class people are less energized, at least on an ongoing basis, by the financial aspect. Working class people seem to be more energized by they want a villain or they want an emotional connection with what's going on. Because what made me realize this is that populists, a lot like populous is a bad word, so to speak, but it's like, okay, we want to do what's good for the majority of the people, but why do populist movements oftentimes always slip into not just, let's get a fair shake in the workplace, but these people are terrible. Let's go persecute these people? And it's like, well, hold on, how did we get from there to there? And what I realized is that, yeah, the wealthy people, you can have a financial message and stick to that financial message, and they'll be like, yeah, yeah, boom, we're on it. You know, we'll stick with it. And this was the election, you know, with, between William Jennings Bryant and McKinley. And McKinley. I stuck to the financial message. And people, they were like, yeah, we got it. But with, with the working class people, a lot of times it seems like you need more. You need to blame immigrants. So you need, like, you can't just have a financial message them energized.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: I think it's a dilemma which maybe just be kind of a circle jerk in a sense. If I can say that it's because that's my professional assessment, the. No, because what I'm thinking is that it's actually a malicious form of governing people if you have leaders that are going to behave this way. But this is kind of human tribalism, which is because the working class is struggling in a society, in a modern society. Like you said, that this late 1800 period was the first time you had so many people in cities that if they didn't have a paycheck, they literally starved to death because they no longer had the skills or the actual resources, like enough land that was, you know, they could go plant stuff and actually make their own food. So now you have all these people that become dependent on the industrialists, right? And that becomes, you know, they're also, you know, in politics and electing government people and all that. But instead of like we see today, right. Instead of, and this is why it's your point. You need the mechanism of the regulatory system, which could be IR's, FTC, things like that, to bring some of the wealth back down so it can sprout back up over time. Because realistically it always ends up the same. No one at the top wants to give up what they have. And I've always fallen on my sword and said, you know, I'm not at the top, but I do pretty well. And I'm not paying an extra penny in taxes because why? Understandable. I'm not writing checks to the treasury just because I'm a nice guy, right? So I'm gonna do what I can do within the system and not anymore. And so that's the attitude of most people with capital. And it's not a good or bad thing. It's just that as human beings, that's how we're wired. Just like when I look outside at the squirrels, you know, they're hoarding all the bird seeds from my bird feeder. I can ask them not to eat my bird seeds because the birds need those, but they're wired to eat and a hoard this stuff.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: So, but interesting thing though, with the, well, just to this point, the other thing that happens and this gets to the initial question is how it warps is that they don't just hoard what they can within the system. What ends up happening a lot of times is when you have the huge accumulations of wealth, is that they influence the system to bend it further to either allow for more accumulations or to reduce the ability or the willingness of the state to do anything about it as well. So it's not just, let's revisit that it's active.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: Yeah, let's revisit that. When we talk about how today mirrors. I think you're onto something there. But just to finish, the thought of the labor side is because laborers are the one, the labor and the working class really are the ones with scarcity in general. In this last 200 years of the way, we've kind of built this society.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: Over 150 years, if they knew how to leverage it. You're right.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so, and so the problem is that the political leaders influenced by the industrialists and capitalists today, we could say it's, it could be lobbying, right?
They are now, what do you call it? They are now able to pit the working class against each other. Because remember back then, like I said, it was the immigrants, and then remember.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: We did our show on the immigrants, it's blacks.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: It's the, it's always something. A different era. Because remember when we did the show on eugenics, it was the. The capitalists able to use the eastern european immigrants as a way to drive a wedge between them and the american working class. Then it became, like you said, the blacks, you know, and when they were asking for civil rights and all that was a way to put a wedge in between the working class. And then when you, when you look at today, it's maybe the southern border or like you said, maybe more of the. The conversation about religion, things like that. And so, because what happens is, I want to get your thoughts on this. There was a part that they talked on very briefly, which again, I saw connection when they talked about the JP Morgan section, when they were talking about how the farming industry in the midwest was becoming more industrialized and that there's so much poverty in the midwest because these farmers were now in debt to these banks on the east coast.
And what happened is they. Cuz you had no regulatory protection for the farmers. They were being charged interest rates between 20 and 50% a year. Most of them couldn't pay the loans back. And if they had a bad crop or two situation, they'd be devastated.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: Basically. They were on credit card type stuff.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: No, but you know, what I thought of, honestly, is the first time, because they were showing the poor pictures of these people, there was like really impoverished and the little kids sitting on the floor farm in the black and white pictures from, you know, the late 18 hundreds. The first time in my life, James, I thought about those were white sharecroppers.
And the difference was that in the south, it was the blacks who were doing the same thing. They were farming land, but it was owned by someone local. It was a local white former plantation owner that was able to manipulate and keep the people on the land by giving them loans that they could never pay back. And it was, this documentary gave me the first look, is that's also what happened to white Americans in the midwest. But instead of it being a local landlord, like literally the term landlord, it was the financier on the east coast bank that had a mortgage against these people. So again, to your point, had the poor blacks and whites and the working class come together at that time, they may have made more inroads by the 1930s for labor, but that's my point is that they got fractured because. Yeah, because it was easy to fracture based on racial.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: It's classic haves and have nots. Like, you can go back to the middle ages and say, well, how can there be a landlord in a castle and there'll be a thousand people with living in shacks right outside of that and working the land? How come those thousand people don't just say, screw this, you know, like, why are we doing this for you? You know? But it's the classic haves and have nots, and that's existed throughout history, and I think it's just been amped up as you get into industrial.
[00:42:46] Speaker B: But hold on, you're onto something fascinating, bro, that goes back to sapiens. The real and imagined orders. Right? Of course, are imagined order.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Yeah, but let me continue, though, because really, I said, what really it comes down to is that the haves can, can be energy, are energized by the, the finances of it all. Like, I'm going to make sure I'm getting a fair shake or I want to bend the system to my advantage. I'm going to vote in that line. I'm going to stay state disciplined and vote on that, whereas the have nots just don't seem to be able to. And whether that's chicken and egg, whether it's because the have nots just are more prone to emotional issues, and so it's easy to distract them. Or that if you're trying to keep the have nots together, you have to pull some emotional issues. So while you start off talking about the finances and getting a fair shake, you end up talking about other religions or something like that. And then that's the only way you think you can keep them together, because if you don't, the. The distraction is going to come, and if you're going to, they're going to get fractured. I don't know, but that seems to be the big, the thing that continues to happen over and over again is that the people who don't control the resources and don't control who have the labor, whose person is necessary in order to get things done. But it's. They are there may, you know, they're just not locked in on, hey, let's make sure I get a good shake for a fair shake financial. It's like, yeah, yeah, I'd like that. I can maybe focus on getting a good shake or fair shake financial for about a year, but after that, I'm off to the next thing I'm looking at. You know, that guy's, you know, a different race to me, or that guy's a different religion to me. He's the reason for my problems. And then you just end up in this. Everybody, you know, you know, the shooting arrows at each other.
[00:44:16] Speaker B: But I think.
Let me. Let me get this point out, because you and I have discussed this privately, which is, I think, part of this phenomenon. I don't know if this unique to United States is our culture, but I think this is something that's developed post industrial age, which is the wealth class, also being able to sell the working class, or at least enough of them, that, hey, don't put these regulations in place, because one day you're gonna be like me. And, you know, that couldn't happen, let's say, in the 15 hundreds or that, or the 9th century when it was monarchies and things like that. Or let's. You were never gonna church.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: You never had.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: You were never gonna be. I mean, that was. That was where we got stories like Cinderella and Snow White, you know, this fantasy that I'm just gonna marry some prints, you know, and that's the only way out of my condition. But once you had, you know, really, that the banking sector and finance, in a way where you could go borrow money and buy land and it would grow, you know, and, like, we saw these guys, these industrialists were the first guys of their generation to make that kind of money. Then, you know, it started. That's why I said, I don't know if it's unique to the United States as a culture, but it started during slavery with the Confederacy, where most white southerners didn't own slaves. But the promise of one day owning slaves by the plantation owners got them all fighting against the union. And then that kind of led itself to.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: And got them holding a system that was to their own economic detriment.
[00:45:39] Speaker B: Think about what we've just been through in the last decade. Our political discussions they tried to bring in in the last decade, I remember somebody did, was talking about a wealth tax on people making over $10 million a year in income that they pay a little bit extra in taxes that fell flat on the face because most Americans are conditioned to believe, oh, one day I might make that kind of money. So one day I'm going to keep that person's interest in check because they, you know, one day I might be that wealthy, and that's what makes this.
[00:46:08] Speaker A: Whole thing selling the dream. But I do want to get to the last point. And, you know, that's, you know, obviously to how the gilded Age may mirror our own. And one thing I think that stood out to me about it was, we're not there. You know, I guess this isn't the Gilded Age. You know, like, but I do think that we're on a trajectory that's similar in terms of, like, the stage has been set in a similar way with these explosive new industries that have changed the fundamental character of society and allowed for huge winners, you know, like, in the way that it did there. Now, again, this is something, when we talk about the Gilded Age, there's a bit. There's a dash in there, you know, you're talking about from the 1870s to 1900 or something like that. That's a long period of time. So while we're in a dash now of what will this become? Will this become as, will the inequality grow as much, continue to grow as much, and be where it was in the Gilded Age? We don't know yet, but we're on a trajectory, though, where you have these huge accumulations of wealth and people using that to then bend society to further serve them. And one of the other things that stood out about the Gilded Age was the complaint that both political parties. Parties were in service of the wealth, you know, and that they weren't. They were losing the connection with the. The working people, or they weren't looking out for their interests. And that's something that it's. But they're not. Both parties aren't the same, but they're definitely elements in each party that are looking at, like, oh, yeah, they may be looking out for the wealth class more than others. You know, like, more or more than the other. Like, so there's at least aspects of each, you know, like, nobody's gonna accuse Elizabeth Warren of being. Being in the bag for the wealth class, but there are elements within her party, for example, that, you know, are, you know, kind of in the bag for the. I would look at, like, the Clintons and saying, like, they're. They're part of their big innovation in the nineties was that we need to. We, as the Democrats, need to be closer to the wealthy people, and then the Republicans sell themselves as the. Probably the party of big business. So both parties have significant elements that are beholden in significant part to. To big business.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: No, that's a big. I think that is probably the biggest comparison to that time. You're right. And that is why, I mean, you said it best, why the public is apathetic and feeling like they're not being represented. And just like we're saying, right, then what happens? It's not like the wealth class, you know, 1520 years ago decided, oh, you know what? The public's right. Let's go get higher taxes on ourselves and start redistributing all this wealth. What are they doing?
They're pitting us against each other, the culture wars, and, and we got to be distracted about gas stoves and transvestites getting beer cans and other things that, you know, I'm sure they're emotionally triggering. And it feels good to talk about it and watch your favorite cable news show that talks bad about, you know, the villain you hate, you know, like, it's Wwe, but in the end, you know, it's not getting us anywhere. And so, and a lot of, or say, put it this way, a few people are getting richer and richer off of our. Because, remember, it's interesting, just like I said, in 1800, as George Washington, I think he died in 1801, you know, was in the last stages of his life, and Thomas Jefferson was ascending, you know, becoming the president of the United States.
You know, there was no way they could even foresee railroads. And the idea that before the end of that century, there will be 70,000 miles of railroad. And what it would have meant to the changing of the landscape that we just spent an hour, like the social.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Care, economic in the industrial, but also the social character of the.
[00:49:39] Speaker B: Yeah, and I'm thinking, because, like you're saying about the exponential growth of technology over time, that things change a lot quicker in shorter windows. I mean, who would have really thought just 30 years ago in 1993, that I would talk into my phone to something called chat GPT and it literally could replace a human being for my whole business? And, and, you know, and this thing would spit out information in 2 seconds, and you'd have this whole, literally now created metaverse, or multiverse, called the Internet, where there's a whole situation of information and all that on there. We couldn't have imagined that just 30 years ago at the way that, I mean, I know that the Internet was already in existence, but the way it's so robust now. Well, that's actually that we're so comfortable with it.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: Let me jump in on that, because that's actually, that was my second point that I was going to make. Is that what you saw? This is another analogy to the, to the gilded age to now, you know, and, or another comparison that really matches up, is that what the railroads did, was they, they made things physically closer. You know, like the physical connection between distinct areas became stronger. With the railroads. You could get things, you could get people various places. What we've seen with the Internet is the, like, social and informational connection has become much stronger now between different areas. So not only can you physically obviously airplanes and cars, you know, they, they doubled down on what the railroad did. But now it's actually regardless of your presence physically, you can be in for social and information environments all around. And so that change I think, mirrors the, you know, like what happened in the gilded age with the physical connection. Now it's a social and informational connection where everybody's right next to each other now everybody, you know, like right here.
[00:51:22] Speaker B: And, you know, a couple of things that I just wanted to say that look again are comparisons. I mean, one of the historians cited a quote from that era, you know, the late 18 hundreds during the Williams JenNIngs Bryan time that quote, unquote, the country has lost its soul. And like, how many times do we hear that today? Right?
And, you know, and it's just, you know, I just think I wrote some notes here and just thinking like how, like I said when Mitt Romney was campaigning in 2012 and remember he said, corporations are people, my friend. And the whole thing about citizens united that corporations have free speech. And again, like you said, that's the chipping away. And that's kind of the whole idea of money and power end up finding each other. Eventually.
The Federal Trade Commission through Teddy Roosevelt, the IR's, all those mechanisms were put in place, like you're saying, to try and break the industrialists and the capitalists from all that capital and allow it to go down and reflate the system. And like you said, it seems to have worked. By the 1950s we had the largest middle class in world history. And again, we're talking about this whole modern form of organizing humans is only under 200 years old because of all these technologies and things. So that's pretty impressive that when the system put its mind to it and decided to make some of those adjustments within a generation or two, we saw the result.
And that included things like the GI bill as well, recycling some of that wealth to make sure Americans, or at least more Americans were educated.
[00:52:57] Speaker A: So, but that led to even more growth. I mean that's the key.
It created this, you know, huge superpower, you know, in the world, you know, United States.
[00:53:07] Speaker B: And it's how we beat the Soviets during the whole war. Yeah. It wasn't through military action. It was the fact that we kept able to produce and basically out gdp them.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: Yeah, we just kept growing.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: They went broke. Yeah, they went broke trying to compete with us. And so that's where I feel like, you know, another quote was, do our governments represent wealth or do they represent people? And these are the things like, these were all things they were talking about in the late 18 hundreds, and it seems like you said about politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, all the way to the folks like Donald Trump. Right. We're competing, we're watching our system, again, compete between what is the role of the government? Who's it going to protect in this country, the people that already got something or the people that don't? And that sounds like a very, like you got to choose. But I think that's the whole point of, like we've talked about why the Congress and all that are important because they're supposed to debate these things so we can come to some sort of middle ground. And the problem is, is when you don't have that type of debate, one side or the other is going to go, you know, through non political means, which is usually violent. Yeah.
[00:54:11] Speaker A: Which is bad. Well, then that's the thing that's most interesting to me about it, though, is that there is an answer that we would be happy with. Most of us, all of us would be happy with, but that involves some type of, like it that involves entropy in the sense that if, if, if you want to, if everybody just wants to keep what they already have with no risk, then that that would be, you know, you won't be happy with what I'm about to say. But as long as we have a system and you, you have cited the term many a times the velocity of money. We need, we need transactions. We need transactions. When things stick, our things get tight. There's, you know, debt goes out of control, everything like that. And so there is a solution that doesn't involve just having a social assist, a pure socialist system, but a system that continues to grow. But you does require, we've seen it in action. It does require mechanisms to push money down, push, push capital down, push wealth down so that the, there could, but what's going to happen, you push it down, it comes back up. But they won't always be the same winner. That's the key. And so the people who are the winners now aren't, aren't really crazy about that because it's like, well, hold on, I've already won. Why do I have to win again? And so you can understand that, you know, you can understand that. It's like, well, I don't want to have to keep fighting money over and.
[00:55:26] Speaker B: Over again, but it's like this squirrel on my bird feeder.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it definitely is. So I think we can end on that note.
[00:55:35] Speaker B: Squirrel just wants to win, man. He doesn't know why I'm mad at him.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: Well, no, it'd be like if you kept taking. If you found his neck, took the nut back down, put it back in the bird feeder, and he had to go get it again. He's like, yo, I already got this. Why do I gotta keep on going it again? But. But not but I think we get it.
[00:55:49] Speaker B: So now I gotta go find the squirrel's house. Would you tell me? I'm gonna go have some fun this weekend. That's for sure.
[00:55:56] Speaker A: No, that's good. That's good. But we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of call. Like I said, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:56:05] Speaker B: I'm Jim.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: All right. I thought you were gonna say, I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut, but I should have.
[00:56:11] Speaker B: That's why I've got a good partner that I'll make sure he says the right thing. When I don't think about these great gems here.
I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut, everyone. There you go. There you go.
