Jay Gould developed the trick of using the judiciary to smash the working class after losing a strike in 1885. He sued one of his railroads with the other, thus driving it into federal receivership and making its workers federal employees. Hey presto, he could get legal injunctions and National Guard troops to smash the next strike in 1886.

The federal judiciary, stacked with capitalist ideologues, then gradually developed a ludicrous reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment as protecting the rights of business. "By making free labor virtually identical with substantive due process, the courts potentially made licensing laws, strikes, boycotts, the closed shop, and even some public health regulations the legal equivalent of slavery," writes White. This would later be formalized by the Supreme Court in Lochner v. Newwith an inflation-adjusted fortune of about $360 billion in 1916. But Jeff Bezos' fortune was recently estimated at $150 billion — up from "only" $57 billion just two years ago. It seems highly possible that he (or another of his cohort) will surpass the Rockefeller mark sometime in the near future.

2. Environmental contamination. Businesses often pollute. The Gilded Age was a filthy time, when poison-spewing factories suffocated workers and cities alike. White notes that despite rising real incomes, both life expectancy at 10 years old and average adult height shrank steadily over almost the whole 19th century, brought down by poor nutrition, epidemic disease, and pollution, and only bottoming out in the 1890s. To be fair, the causes of the problem were poorly understood at the time, but