We know how to beat robber barons.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Essay

Americans have been wrestling with robber barons for a very long time. The term was first applied in an American context almost 150 years ago as a shorthand description for the railroad magnates and industrialists who were scheming to employ a combination of corporate monopoly and political corruption to redistribute wealth upward.

In 1870, The Atlantic denounced robber barons as "this new aristocracy of swindling millionaires." Three years later, speaking to the University of Wisconsin Law School graduating class, the future chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Edward Ryan, declared: "There is looming up a new and dark power.... The accumulation of individual wealth seems greater than it has ever been since the downfall of the Roman Empire. The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic power conquests only, but for political power.

"For the first time in our politics, money is taking the field as an organized power," warned Ryan. "The question shall arise, and arise in your day though perhaps not fully in mine: Which shall rule, wealth or man? Which shall lead--money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations--educated and patriotic free men or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?"

We hear echoes of the same language today, as National Nurses United union leader RoseAnn DeMoro decries "the parade of billionaires who seem to think our votes are just another entitlement of their wealth," and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders warns, "The great political struggle we now face is whether the United States retains its democratic heritage or whether we move toward an oligarchic form of society where the real political power rests with a handful of billionaires, not ordinary Americans."

The rhetorical parallels can lead to a sense that the robber barons have been on a steady trajectory, that the balance of power had always tilted entirely in their favor and that it is absurd to try and prevent them from closing the deal on America. That sense can be reinforced by data that tells us the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans today collect more of the nation's income than at any time since the 1920s, renewing a Gilded Age pattern where the top 1 percent control more of America's largesse than the bottom 90 percent.

But to compare statistics from the start of the last century with statistics from the start of this one is to miss the history that matters. That history, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reminds us, includes the picture of "a long historical decline in the concentration of wealth from the late 1920s into the late 1970s." For the better part of fifty years, as progressive tax and regulatory policies were implemented and barriers to the organization of unions were removed, American prosperity began to be shared. There was still a substantial gap between rich and poor but, as the center notes, in the high-tax, high-unionization boom times following World War II, "incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder."

Things have changed, radically, in the decades since Ronald Reagan and the trickle-down fabulists who surrounded him established a new economic paradigm where a Gilded Age wish list of tax cuts for the rich, privatization of public services, free trade...