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Comment by PNWChris | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that many of the oligarchs quite literally stole what they have during the 1990s free-for-all (Soviet collapse).

This is opposed to many western business people who won by making better products and generally advancing our standard of living. Whether they deserve the astonishing wealth they have is up for debate (I believe in a wealth tax), but but at least they did something for it!

The Wikipedia page says roughly that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch

The Wikipedia for Gazprom has a great timeline of how one such business became an elaborate exercise in theft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazprom#History

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> many of the oligarchs quite literally stole what they have during the 1990s

Yeah well, it's not like people like Richard Branson didn't do the same (to this very day)...

Throughout the ages, wealth tends to be opportunistically accrued, to put it mildly. Steinbeck wrote something about that. It's just that we are somewhat closer to the age of "primary enrichment" when it comes to Russia, whereas we've kinda forgotten our own robber barons.

I'm unware of stories where Richard Branson, or any other present-day British or American billionaire, got their wealth by capturing a business as it was spun off from government control. Private corrections companies are the closest example I can think of, and I don't think anyone would accuse the media of being friendly towards them.

State company privatizations are a form of theft. Not with guns, but same results.

The value is such that no one could normally buy the infrastructure, yet such infrastructure is often sold for pennies.

Sometimes that infrastructure is only worth pennies due to associated debts, and restrictions that governments impose on laying off unproductive workers.

If it's sold on a market, then it's value is it's sale price. Competing investors want to make money too.

Well, according to market proponents anyway. I think we should stop treating them as economic oracles and consider other forms of valuation as well, like the marginal cost to the population if the service and the jobs it provides didn't exist.

Obviously people who are potential bidders in a market are heavily incentivized to downplay the value of what they're bidding on, so it's not clear to me why their metric of valuation should be privileged above all others. It's just like the idea that efficiency should be conceived of in terms of minimizing production cost, without regard to the effects of that approach on customer/employee retention or organizational resilience - partly because those second-order effects are a little harder to measure, partly because owners have an economic incentive to promote that particular definition above all others.

Scientific American recently had an article on how wealth concentration is inevitable, without active mechanisms to continually counter it:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

And there was already in ancient Greece, some 2600 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seisachtheia

"a set of laws instituted by the Athenian lawmaker Solon (c. 638 BC–558 BC) in order to rectify the widespread serfdom and slavery that had run rampant in Athens by the 6th century BC, by debt relief."

"The seisachtheia laws immediately cancelled all outstanding debts, retroactively emancipated all previously enslaved debtors, reinstated all confiscated serf property to the hektemoroi, and forbade the use of personal freedom as collateral in all future debts. The laws instituted a ceiling to maximum property size - regardless of the legality of its acquisition (i.e. by marriage), meant to prevent excessive accumulation of land by powerful families."

Elon Musk comes to mind.

Branson preyes on privatizations in the UK. He captured the most profitable train line in the country and extracted large profits from it. He's currently busy doing the same with the National Health Service.

According to Wikipedia, which you liberally quote, the definition of oligarch has nothing to do with the way their assets have been obtained.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

2. The crime to gain it and the crime to keep it.

No one becomes a billionaire without stepping on some toes.

>My understanding is that many of the oligarchs quite literally stole what they have during the 1990s free-for-all (Soviet collapse). This is opposed to many western business people who won by making better products and generally advancing our standard of living.

But totally compatible with how western business people got their start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

Incorrect for two reasons. One, we’re talking about groups of people tied together by how they got wealthy. You are apparently lumping together Bezos and Zuckerberg in with railroad industrialists who have nothing in common other than they are “western business people.”

2) The oligarchs literally stole money from the State. The robber barons, although accused of using unscrupulous methods, did not.

>One, we’re talking about groups of people tied together by how they got wealthy. You are apparently lumping together Bezos and Zuckerberg in with railroad industrialists who have nothing in common other than they are “western business people.”

I'm not talking about Bezos and Zuckerberg. I'm talking about how industrialists on the west got their start in the "good ole times".

Point being that post-Communist countries elites used the same methods that early western capitalism used, to bootstrap themselves into capitalism...

>2) The oligarchs literally stole money from the State. The robber barons, although accused of using unscrupulous methods, did not.

The oligarchs didn't have to have "stole money from the state" (not directly at least). Rather, much like western capitalists of yore and of modern day, they benefited from having "friends" in the state, legislators in their pockets, etc, to secure rents and monopolies, special deals, thwart competition, etc.

> the robber barons, although accused of using unscrupulous methods, did not.

That’s a bold claim that I don’t believe holds up. Even setting aside specifically illegal business practices (bribery, violence, fraud) - the robber baron industrialists exploited the rules of capitalism to concentrate wealth and enrich themselves on the backs of their workers and society. They got ludicrously rich, and everybody else got... what? Less competition in the oil industry? In that sense they robbed us all.

Even if you believe that capitalism is the right system for the world, you have to see extreme concentration of wealth as a problem. Put simply, what is better for society: 1 billionaire, or 1,000 millionaires? I believe that it’s pretty clearly the latter.

It’s not a “bold claim” to say that something that may or may not be undesirable (wealth concentration) is different than something that has been illegal under our laws going back to Biblical times (stealing).

Also, the whole “robber baron” thing is distorted: https://fee.org/articles/how-the-myth-of-the-robber-barons-b.... By and large they became wealthy because they provided an incredibly valuable new service that catalyzed vast amounts of new economic activity. I suspect 50 or 100 years from now, you’ll read similar revisionist histories about the dawn of the Internet age. The proponents of central planning are already working on it.

I think it’s a bold claim because although nobody is saying john d rockafeller broke into a bank and stole money, he has certainly been accused of corrupt (illegal) business practices.

But if we set illegal business practices aside, I still think it’s bold to say the massively wealthy industrialists didn’t do anything wrong because of the case i made in my comment (in short: the inherent immorality of large wealth accumulation).

> By and large they became wealthy because they provided an incredibly valuable new service that catalyzed vast amounts of new economic activity.

What was the new and valuable service consolidating the US oil industry provided? There were oil companies, that was already happening... what value was added by rolling it all into one ball? If you believe in capitalism you would agree that competition is good for an industry, so how is the thing that made rockafeller so rich (consolidation) good for anyone but him?

And i already believe that a lot of what has happened in the last 10-15 years of the internet age is actively bad for our society, no central planning needed - just open eyes.

Also an aside: I started reading that article... I was giving it a fair shake (tho generally finding it unconvincing), until I encountered this sentence:

> The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University

In what world is his being jewish relevant to the article, except to dog-whistle anti-semetic protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion conspiracy bs? Disgusting.

FEE is quite biased.

Not really.

By that standard Bill Gates is a robber baron.

Arguably true. Think of the war microsoft waged against Linux in the late 90s-early 2000s, or their attempts to co-opt and destroy the www using non-standards compliance in internet explorer. I see that as a company damaging the common good to increase their wealth. I.e. Robbing us, enriching themselves

If Bill Gates is included, then the definition is so broad as to lose any usefulness.

If the net is so wide as to include all billionaires, that’s only 2000-ish people. not saying they are definitely all robber barons but just giving this some scope.

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