Expository Piece

This exhibit you see in front of you is about a group of people known as the Robber Barons. No, there not a mischievous group of city dwellers that rob unprotected people at night. There are a bunch of monopolistic businessman. What do is it mean to commit monopoly, well; it’s buying out all of your competitors. One of the modern robber barons might be Bill Gates, he has been charged for monopoly a couple of times. Still don’t get it? Think about the actual board game. Monopoly is about buying out all of the places on the board until your opponent is flat broke.

John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, with a total net worth of $128 billion, was a robber baron. He owned a company called Standard Oil, today it is known as such companies like Chevron, Exxon, Sohio, etc. Over the years, Standard Oil was the best oil refinery in the world, but after an exposé of Standard Oil, in the novel by Ida Tarbell, The History of Standard Oil. People got curious.

Standard oil was broken up in 1911, after the congress split it up for monopolistic acts. It got split up into 34 different companies, three of which I stated above. The reason your company could get split up for monopoly is because it is simply unfair. Think of it like the gaming console companies. Let’s say Nintendo, creator of the Wii, bought out Sony, producers of the Play Station, and Microsoft, creators of the Xbox. If Nintendo was the only game producer, they could raise their prices to incredible amounts, because there were the only games available, and there had no competitors. Basically if you wanted to buy a game, it would have to be Nintendo games, so they could mess with the consumer all they wanted. They could also start making the quality of the games lower, because again, there are no competitors. That’s what the term “robber baron” means and why it is against the law to commit monopoly.