Posted on 01/25/2011 6:50:05 AM PST by SeekAndFind
When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time.
What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. With the high price of kerosene at that time, an ordinary working man could not afford to stay up at night, burning this expensive fuel for hours at a time.
Rockefeller did not begin his life rich, by any means. He made a fortune by revolutionizing the petroleum industry. Although we still measure petroleum in barrels, it is actually shipped in railroad tank cars, in ocean-going tankers, and in tanker trucks.
That is a legacy of John D. Rockefeller, who saw that shipping oil in barrels was not as economical as shipping whole railroad tank cars full of oil, eliminating all the labor that had to go into shipping the same amount of oil in numerous individual barrels. That was just one of his cost-cutting innovations. If there was a better way to extract, process, and ship petroleum products — or more products that could be made from petroleum — Rockefeller was on top of it.
Before he came along, gasoline was considered a useless byproduct that petroleum refineries often simply dumped into the nearest river. But Rockefeller decided to use it as a fuel in the refining process, which made it valuable, even before automobiles came along.
Today, we tend to think of John D. Rockefeller as just one of those famous rich people. But Rockefeller didn’t just “happen to have money.” How he got rich is the real story — and it is a story whose implications reach far beyond that one particular individual.
Before Rockefeller’s innovations reduced the price of kerosene to a fraction of what it had once been, there wasn’t a lot for poor people to do when nightfall came, other than go to bed. But the advent of cheap kerosene added hours of light and activity to each day for people with low or moderate incomes.
It was much the same story with the advent of the automobile, which gave millions of people more range in space, as kerosene (and, later, electricity) gave them more range in terms of hours of daily activity.
Here again, automobiles and electric lights were truly luxuries of the rich when they began. Only after ways were developed to cut their costs drastically were such things brought within the reach of ordinary Americans. Henry Ford’s mass-production methods cut in half the cost of producing the famous Model-T Ford in just five years. People who had once lived their entire lives within a narrow radius of a relatively few miles could now go see places they never knew about before. The automobile expanded their horizons.
People today who complain about the automobile’s pollution have no idea how much more pollution there was before the automobile came along. In New York City, for example, the 40,000 horses that were the backbone of the city’s transportation before the automobile produced 400 tons of manure per working day, along with 20,000 gallons of urine.
At one time, people like Rockefeller, Edison, Ford, and the Wright brothers were regarded as heroes, for having opened vast new possibilities for other human beings. The fact that they got rich doing it was an incidental part of the story.
We still have people revolutionizing our lives. Just think of the computer, and the pharmaceuticals that have not only lengthened our lives but made them more healthful, so that being 80 years old today is like being 60 years old in times past.
But today we seldom even know the names of those who have made these monumental contributions to human well-being. All we know is that some people have gotten “rich” and so others should feel some sort of grievance.
Many of the people we honor today are people who are skilled in the rhetoric of grievances and promises of new “rights” at someone else’s expense. But is that what is going to make a better America?
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Rockefeller was a sunovabi* and produced a sunovabi* family who continue to practice his methods of slashing & burning everyone else so that your thing dominates.
The corporations that were started and thrived here in America can thank the people who worked for those companies. Sure, those people were making a living and the owners became wealthy. It is apaulling to me to now see many of those same companies abandon this country and it’s people and relocate the manufacturing of their product to another country. They must have forgotten from where they came.
That pic did not come out so well...
looks fine to me...........
People today who complain about the automobile’s pollution have no idea how much more pollution there was before the automobile came along. In New York City, for example, the 40,000 horses that were the backbone of the city’s transportation before the automobile produced 400 tons of manure per working day, along with 20,000 gallons of urine
The smell before cars and modern sewage systems must have been intense. I would go so far as to suggest that cars, indoor plumbing and waste management have played a huge role in our increased life span. It is much more sanitary today, easier to keep from getting a serious disease.
How about THIS one?........
And then their money was put into starting up tax free foundations that fund every subversive group in America.
American workers aren't, in large, great workers anymore.
Oh yes, my brother, my cousin, my uncle, etc... a million “personal examples” of hardworking blue collar workers.
But in large, in a labor force, you'd have to be OUT OF YOUR MIND, to open a company that involves anything but “services” (and that is quickly changing too- I've found India customer service much more pleasant than American once you get past the accent) in the USA at this point.
Risk v Reward... why would I risk so much, only to have people instantly organize, demand what is unreasonable and above market, then take my risk (re: company) down because they are mad they didn't have the determination, foresight, intelligence, will to RISK, that the founder/owner did. These people don't even appreciate that this person has created a job for them... they hold them in contempt.
I'm embarrassed at the state of the American worker..and don't expect anyone with half a brain to make anything here until unions are castrated, taxes lowered (and here we see them moving the opposite direction to a VAT), wages left to the market, and employers held liable to the extreme for using illegal labor.
There was a time, that I think your referring to, when MADE in America, meant a skilled, caring craftsmen/factory worker, actually put their soul and pride into things, and management cared about their reputation, and those attitudes were reflected in the outcome of the product. Not today- most people working in blue collar labor who aren't from the “greatest generation) by and large see it as a punishment (why on earth, I have no idea) they have to work and that the man who actually put this all together (as If working a production job daily is ANYWHERE near the level of personal,planning, time, and financial investment the founder/owners/ management put in.
Yes, I have relatively strong feelings on this issue, as I think the loss of our true manufacturing base and the true “American attitude” is our biggest undoing.
But:
John D. Rockefeller IV, i.e. Jay Rockefeller, is a current Senator in West Virginia, which with by the way, like Hillary Clinton with New York, he has little native association, just leverage to become a political honcho.
Jay Rockefeller is a Democrat, who like all similar, needs to appease his own guilt and protect his own selfishness, by using other people's money to appear as generous. This individual, like virtually all Democrats, is a sick example of humanity - he actually executes his life as one big rationalization, confiscating and using other people's resources. If you do not understand this then you are the problem.
I believe it was Christ who said it was harder for a rich man to aspire to heaven than ... And Jay Rockefeller, George Soros, Marc Rich, Bernard Maddoff, etc. are exactly what He was referring to. When people like Jay Rockefeller or George Soros or Barbara Boxers', bank accounts, people who act to force their own agendas on the rest of us, are reduced to my level, then I will consider their opinions. That is not saying that one cannot accumulate wealth, it is saying that having done so you shut up and commit to your own charitable sacrifice, not that of others.
It is not a difficult message to understand; charity is NOT redistributing other people's money. In Kenneth Clark's amazingly insightful masterpiece "Civilisation," he explicitly makes the observation, in that episode relevant to the rise of Dutch mercantilism, that once wealth is acquired for some unexplained reason men want to go on to acquire power over others. That is the despicable nature of those cited. And America is in the middle of that, the CFR, the Rockefellers, the avaricious Jews, virtually all the US Senators.
For your information this elitism is essentially Feudalism. And in this supposed Republic it is only the intelligence and revelation of the common voter that will defeat it.
Johnny Suntrade
I’d a loved him, Ida hated him.
Alas, they were all part of the ruling oligarchy—or became part—of these characters . . . deliberately amassing and monopolizing wealth in order to establish the Biblical satanic global communist/socialist/monopolistic bastardized capitalist government.
In their own words:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2130557/posts?page=129#129
Innovations etc. have been wonderful for the working and middle class in many ways.
Yet, a lot of the time, the oligarchy has just used the added wealth and centralized structures to further enslave and control . . . and their enslavements and controls waiting in the wings are orders of magnitude worse.
The implanable ID chip is now reportedly down to the size of a pencil point dot on a paper . . . and to be injected with the next REQUIRED flu vaccination.
TRAITOROUS BUSTARD AND JR STOOGE.
Anyone who thinks Ford was in charge
is ignorant.
INDEED. I don’t know about 100% of such groups but the vast majority, for sure.
and a lot else and worse of the black ops sorts of stuff.
ONE of our biggest undoings.
Allowing the FEd and the Congress to get away with treason vs Constitutional government are both worse.
Congress critters have not cared a flip about their constituents for decades.
Well, not 100%, some groups are new, some groups are small.
:)
As to the other stuff, don’t get me started....
When I die, I want to go out like Nelson Rockefeller, with a smile on my face...not like Megan Marshack, screaming, crying and gasping for breath.
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