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Jules Verne is fun to read in this regard because the people who organized to go to the moon in "From Earth To The Moon" were simply part of a gun club that cho
by narrator 3y ago
Jules Verne is fun to read in this regard because the people who organized to go to the moon in "From Earth To The Moon" were simply part of a gun club that chose to fund the effort privately, not the government. It reflects how people had a different relationship with the government in the 19th century.
Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal bank accounts, much to the consternation of bankers like J.P Morgan. Private individuals were massively more economically powerful and that's were people looked for progress. Only Elon Musk comes close to this level of economic power in the modern era, especially because he is a hands on industrialist and not a financier, but there were probably a few hundred who had that level of influence back then and they were mostly industrialists.
- philwelch 3y ago> Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal bank accounts, much to the consternation of bankers like J.P Morgan. To my understanding it was Morgan and not Rockefeller who engaged in these kinds of bailouts.
- atdrummond 3y agoI think OP’s point was that JP Morgan wanted to see that role supplanted by the government, even if he was forced to sometimes play guarantor himself.
- judge2020 3y agoWhile Elon is the only one with the intuition to bail out a company as large as Twitter, there probably are a few dozen Rockefeller CEOs of various SV/tech-adjacent companies that can and do use their power to command acquisitions of medium size startups that have promising tech but suffer from issues of cash flow or business strategy.
- worrycue 3y ago> While Elon is the only one with the intuition to bail out a company as large as Twitter What intuition? Wasn’t he forced to buy Twitter by the SEC? He bought it at 4x the valuation - Twitter’s ex-shareholders made it out like bandits. Now he is losing money hand over fist thanks to Twitter - as Twitter’s ad revenue has dropped due to his changes (and big mouth) and he is paying to the tune of 1 billion USD a year in interest from the loan to buy Twitter; Twitter’s yearly income on the best of years have come nowhere close to a billion.
- judge2020 3y agoIntuition was italicized for a reason - it was sarcasm.
- pjc50 3y agos/bail out/fly into the ground/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rtpg 3y agoJules Verne is an interesting example, because his books often have themes about traveling more than anything. I feel like at the time (and now!) major projects to just go somewhere were seen as "rich people hobbies". Things are "easier" now for things like mountain climbing but even now most undersea exploration is just financed out of rich people's pockets. In a world where artificial satelites aren't a thing that is a useful good, I doubt that NASA exists.
- pjc50 3y ago> Private individuals were massively more economically powerful and that's were people looked for progress Did they? The people themselves looked? Or did the private individuals get to fund a large amount of libraries and educational institutions with "[your name here] supports progress" instead? The peak of this may have been Fordlandia, Ford's attempt at doing a private Latin American colony, which was a spectacular failure. Interestingly, Verne has a book about private libertarian-separatist rich men: "Propeller Island". It ends in infighting and disaster.