While in Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving I visited the Carnegie Museum for Natural History and stood in awe of the dinosaurs that Carnegie paid to have dug up, shipped to Pittsburgh, and assembled by paleontologists. I visited the Carnegie Art Museum to see the special display of Japanese woodcuts. I was next door to the Pittsburgh Carnegie library and not too far from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall.
Scattered across the United States are hundreds of smaller Carnegie libraries. He provided the funds to build 1,795 of them in this country and a few hundred more in other countries as well. I know he was a robber baron. I know he treated his steel mill workers unfairly. Nonetheless, he also left an amazing positive legacy.
Contrast that with today’s wealthy tycoons. Peter Thiel is attempting to build a separate colony for rich people on floating islands. And how about that Elon Musk? Our current crop of robber barons just don’t stack up.
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