If 19th-century plutocrats are dinosaurs, we’re now in Jurassic Park

From The Economist

Americans had expected something different from the eradication of slavery and the triumph of free labour after the Civil War. They anticipated a world where all men (they did not count the labour of women) who were willing to work—farmers, craftsmen and small-business owners—could attain a competency. That word, now nearly vanished, denoted a sum sufficient to support a family and launch children into the world with enough remaining for a comfortable old age.

Embedded in the ideology of free labour and competency was a conviction that the central purpose of the American economy was to sustain the republic. It should produce economically independent citizens who could not be dictated to or corrupted by the rich and powerful. Instead, the era produced a nation of wage labourers dependent on those who employed them. An economic precarity took hold among the working poor that they often compared to slavery.

Those who profited from the Gilded Age offered a different measure of economic success: the maximum production of wealth. Individualism, once identified with economic independence, became synonymous with the ability to acquire riches. Wealth became the measure of merit and ability. How it was distributed was not the concern of the republic.