David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, you're playing right into my, what I tried to say at the top of the show and what I was alluding to when our world is a Rockefeller shaped one, and in more ways than just Standard Oil. All right, there's definitely some playbook and other things that I want to talk about here. But first, let's talk about power. I think we probably did the seven powers justice in Part I and we don't need to do it again. But I do want to make a point, especially because we teased it in the intro of where did they have legitimate business practices and where did they run afoul? Where the initial power that they had in the business really came from their operating excellence, creating economies of scale, innovating clever production, inventions, and refining. But then, later on, they clearly leverage their scale position to put competitors out of business, screw over partners like the Railroad, and try and gobble up as much of the value chain in really nefarious ways. Eventually, they just straight-up used racketeering and bribery to ensure that their very profitable business at 90% market share could continue. One fun little sidebar that I missed in the notes on that, literally, was straight-up bribery. I think we've only talked about political campaign donations. Archbold was really somebody. When he took over, he actually put legislators on the payroll, not campaign donations, just like you get $15,000 a year, you get $20,000 a year to do what we want in perpetuity. I think the best way to put it is probably, they became unsatisfied with what they had accomplished and they just kept pushing. This is probably the right transition point to what would have happened otherwise. What if the trust hadn't gotten broken up? I think we should examine it from Standard Oil shareholders’ perspective, which I think we're all going to say like, what would have been worse? Consumers’ perspective and then competitors' perspective? In part, maybe even before what would have happened if they hadn't been broken up, maybe we should examine what would have happened if they hadn't gone into nefarious business practices. What if they just were the leading innovator, they had the best operational excellence, and they were operating at a large scale so they could have legal scale dynamics out at play?…

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