What a weird way to say you didn't bother clicking on the link: > In the 19th century, American robber barons got together and formed trusts: For example, a gr

What a weird way to say you didn't bother clicking on the link: > In the 19th century, American robber barons got together and formed trusts: For example, a group of railroad owners could sell their shares to a “railroad trust” and become beneficiaries of the trust. The trustees—the same robber barons, or their representatives—would run the trust, deciding how to operate all these different, nominally competing railroads to maximize the return to the trustees (the railroads’ former owners). > A trust was a way of merging all the dominant companies in a single industry (or even multiple related industries, like oil refineries, railroads, pipelines, and oil wells) into a single company, while maintaining the fiction that all of these companies were their own businesses. > Any company that didn’t sell to the trust was quickly driven to its knees. For example, if you owned a freight company and wouldn’t sell out to the trust, all the railroads you depended on to carry your freight would charge you more than they’d charge your competitors for carrying the same freight—or they’d refuse to carry your freight at all. > What’s more, any business that supplied a trust would quickly find itself stripped of its profit margins and either bankrupted and absorbed by the trust, or allowed to eke out bare survival. If you supplied coal to the railroad trust, all the railroads would refuse to buy your coal unless you knocked your prices down until you were making next to nothing—or losing money. Hell, if you got too frisky, they might refuse to carry your coal from the coal mine to the market, and then where’d you be?