At the turn of the previous century, the captains of industry were known as "robber barons", and they mistreated their workers in ways that we see in the third world now: low wages, no medical care, outrageous hours, overpriced company stores, substandard company housing. Workers ran up interminable "debt" to the company due to unreasonably low wages and unreasonably high prices for the commodities sold by the companies at their monopoly stores in their towns. Children were sent to work for the companies in an attempt to pay off the debt. Whole families worked like dogs and lived in penury.

The captains of industry, meanwhile, lived in luxury, rewarded for all the stress they endured, and for their original ideas, their good luck, and their nerve. They neglected to notice that their continuing profit on their investment was fed by the hard work of their companies' laborers, who led desperate lives.

The fact is, though entrepreneurs deserve profit for their investment of time, money and original thought, the workers are the ones who build their efforts into economic powerhouses. The robber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries didn't acknowledge their debt, with the result that unions rose, socialism became a popular economic philosophy, communism came to be of interest as a political system, and government, after a dangerous period of street violence, became involved in forcing a little humanity on some of the more egregious offenders. We forget that the US teetered on the edge of chaos because we only see how the crises were resolved, and our history appears inevitable to us as we read it. Things could have turned out much differently.

Are there moral capitalists? Sure. They are mostly people who have a connection with their workers, and who look at them as more than mere assets. Look at Sam Walton. Now look at his heirs and their fellow stockholders. The difference is obvious.

If capitalism were naturally moral, we wouldn't have unions. They would never have risen because workers would not have had the need to defend themselves and their families by using the only bargaining chip they had: their labor, organized.

I don't want to go back to "the good old days". We have already returned to the good old days. We're having to learn those lessons all over again because we have forgotten them. The triumvirate of capitalism consists of capital, means of production, and labor. The people with the capital have convinced themselves and others for the last decade or so that they are superior to those who supply the labor, and so those who supply labor have no right to more of the profits than those with the capital deign to give them. They are so wrong, but in the short term, they can still winter in Aruba. Quarterly thinking: it's the intellectual equivalent of buying stock on margin. It can't go on forever.