“The disparity in income between the rich and the poor is merely the survival of the fittest. It is the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” – John D. Rockefeller, 1894. During the first 70 years that followed this pronouncement by one of the 19th-century’s leading “robber barons,” the worst excesses of unfettered free enterprise were curbed by government regulations, increases in the minimum wage, and the growth of the labour movement.
