When the laws of the nation force you to buy their products at highly inflated prices, you are putting money in their pockets. When the laws of the nation force you to hire, at excessively high rates, their shipping, banking, insurance, warehousing, etc. , you are putting money in their pockets.
When there are high taxes on everything *YOU* want to buy, but low taxes on everything *THEY* want to buy, you are putting money in their pockets.
When the government spends the tax money mostly on them, though they only produced 28% of it, you are putting money in their pockets.
You say all this is natural, but it sure seems to correspond to their control of congress, same then as it is today.
There is a reason they coined the term "Robber Barons" for the gilded era. That is how they behaved, and they had undue influence on government, same then as today.
The same elite urban or suburban culture prevails in Atlanta or Charlotte and in NYC or LA. Our current divisions are ideological not regional.
Generally divided along the lines of Urban vs Rural, same then as today.
The Cities are liberal, the countryside is conservative. There is something about densely populated cities that make people crazy. I don't know what it is, but i've seen it so often I no longer think of it as a theory.
That is not true, as we have already discussed for years.
There is a reason they coined the term "Robber Barons" for the gilded era. That is how they behaved, and they had undue influence on government, same then as today.
The Gilded Age came after the Civil War. Before that, if you're talking about New York City, you're talking about Edith Wharton's little old New York. There were rich families there then but nothing like what there was later. Some wealthy planters, recognized that they had common interests with New York merchants and bankers, and that they weren't all that different. Some New Yorkers felt that way about their Southern clients. The two groups even intermarried. But when slavery became a big issue, grievance mongers took over and Southern elites became convinced that the Northerners were cheating them.