Or, maybe, you've missed the point that I disagree with the sentiment of the author of the comment to which I was responding. The only negative I could find in the article was that he was a "monopolist" (whatever that means to the author) and hence, that's bad. Was he using his monopolist power to cheat widows and orphans, or to deliver cheap heating oil to New York City?
No, because the point of the comment above you was precisely that, while he did so some good things in the end, and that was positive, he could just as easily been evil. And I shudder to think what a man with such power and ruthlessness and resources could do. He didn't do any major harm in the end, but he could very easy had, had he just been as ruthless and efficient and unwaveringly certain of the justness of his cause as he was, but with more sinister ends instead.
Benevolent dictators are bad, even if they did good, because them existing means a bad one could just as easily appear.
But I disagree that he could have done anything bad. What's the worst thing a monopolist can do? Charge unfairly large prices. By the time his the government got around to breaking up his "empire" for the politicians' own venal reasons, the global market had grown so large, that he already couldn't service it all himself. If he had raised prices as his end-game, the forces necessary to capitalize on that opportunity were already deployed and ready to strike at his market share.
The only dictator I see in the picture are the politicians/regulators who broke it up for their own political gain. Those are the dangerous ones because no matter what they do, we can't shop elsewhere.
> What's the worst thing a monopolist can do? Charge unfairly large prices.
It's not so much about Rockefeller being a monopolist as it is about him being a private citizen with truly enormous economic power, while being zealously devoted to a simple cause, and having the ability to rationalize away all doubts. These are worrying personality traits that facilitate doing great damage.
In the case of Rockefeller, these personality traits led to constructive outcomes, but the point I was trying to make toward the end was that it seemed a chance event that he would use his power for the philanthropic projects that he chose.
Here's a hypothetical: what if, for instance, Rockefeller had supported eugenics rather than medical science? How would that have turned out?
