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Monopolies During The Gilded Age

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We live in a world where the money we make is taxed to help the community, despite the fact that some people in the community don't deserve benefits because they don't work for it. This idea of spreading the wealth has been in the America for hundreds of years. The Gilded age was a era of American history where the capitalist market flourished. During this period revelations about Capitalism formed. Two great minds came to totally different conclusions about Capitalism. One named Andrew Carnegie believed that businesses worked for their money, ergo they should be able to do what ever they wan with it. The other named David McCullough believed that in order for Capitalism to succeed the people with responsibility needed to act responsibly, …show more content…

There was also minimal job security for the workers because immigrants were fighting against citizens for jobs. This allowed the monopolies to take advantage of the workers because they would hire whoever worked for the lowest price. Also the Labour contract law permitted industrial employers to pay for the passage of workers in advance and deduct the amount later from their wages. This allowed businessmen to exploit their workers and extend their contracts by lying. These monopolies allowed a single company to own the entire market of a product. This allowed the businessmen to increase the price of their product because there wasn't any competition. This was a problem because without competition all people are forced to by the product from one company no matter the price because there wasn't any where else they could get it. Not only did these crooked businessmen swindle their workers and rig the market they also claimed to help the community. These businessmen “attempted to help the community by creating opportunities for people to move forward in life”. This can be seen through the libraries Andrew Carnegie built. Andrew Carnegie claimed to have built libraries so that people could “pull themselves up from their own bootstraps” just as he did, but this didn't make sense for the time period he lived in. During the era most people were illiterate making the books in the libraries useless to him. This caused people to believe that he created the libraries strictly to spread his name through the country and become more famous. If Carnegie truly wanted to help the community he would have houses for the children living in crammed homes. Jacob A. Riis observed the living condition of some inner-city children and wrote, “There was

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