Timothy Noah, The New Republic: “Rapacious capitalists ain’t what they used to be. “Law? What do I care about the law?” the shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt (1794-1877)  famously bellowed (in legend, if not in fact). “Hain’t I got the power?” His son William (1821-1885) demonstrated a similar indifference to public opinion when he said, “The public be damned…. I don’t take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody’s good but our own, because we are not.” The banking tycoon J.P. Morgan (1837-1913) held the same view, and didn’t hesitate to articulate it. “I owe the public nothing,” he said. “Men owning property should do what they like with it.” None of these men pretended to reconcile their acquisition of wealth with the common good, or even with the law as it applied to lesser men. This attitude posed certain problems, but it left them with what, in retrospect, seems a refreshing unconcern about what people said about them. Being rich, they understood, made it unlikely they would be loved.”