All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to
capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but
by government intervention into the economy. The giants of American
industry—such as James Jerome Hill or Commodore Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie
or J. P. Morgan—were self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal
ability, by free trade on a free market. But there existed another kind of
businessmen, the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who
made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government,
such men as the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was the political
power behind their activities—the power of forced, unearned, economically
unjustified privileges—that caused dislocations in the country’s economy,
hardships, depressions, and mounting public protests. But it was the free
market and the free businessmen that took the blame.