Your 'Robber Baron,' my American hero: or at least that's true in many cases.(HISTORY)

IN terms of blunders, it's not quite launching a land war in Southeast Asia, but one would still be well-advised not to rely on Nancy Pelosi for lessons on history or economics. "We are living in a new era of robber barons," the woman-who-would-be-Speaker proclaimed recently. "The American consumer is paying record prices, while oil companies make record profits and make record contributions to Republicans."

Ah, the Robber Barons: those bloodylipped ghouls preying on the downtrodden. Clearly using the Liberal Field Guide to Spotting a Robber Baron, Pelosi mentions three keys to spotting one in the wild. First, the consumer--a.k.a. "the little guy"--is having a rough time. Second, some rich people--a.k.a. "fat cats"--are making some extra coin. And third, Republicans --a.k.a. "the focus of evil"--are benefiting in the process.

So entrenched is the Robber Baron epithet, in our textbooks and our culture, that we've come to think of them as an objective social class, as epistemologically real as "the poor" or "the middle class." The reality is a bit different. One cannot say that the "robber barons" of the 19th century didn't, in fact, exist--but the term is so freighted with partisanship that it distorts more than it reveals. It's analogous to Ronald Reagan's use of the term "welfare queens." Indisputably, there were "welfare queens" in the sense that there were women who gamed the system for personal gain. But few would dispute that the term is highly partisan; imagine a school textbook 20, or 200, years from now using "welfare queen" as an objective, analytical term.

There were real robber barons--in the 12th and 13th centuries. These were feudal lords who controlled access to key transportation sites, like rivers, bridges, and mountain passes. They would extract exorbitant fees from desperate travelers with no choice but to pay. Sometimes they were simply highwaymen acting under the color of authority. So here is irony number one: The original robber barons weren't businessmen at all, but grasping state officials.

In the 19th century the term emerged as a catchall for brigands, highwaymen, and carpetbaggers. After the Civil War, it was increasingly used to describe Carnegies and the like. But it wasn't until Matthew Josephson's intellectually bankrupt 1934 book, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901, that the term stuck as a description of those leeches of the liberal imagination. Josephson was a relentless partisan for socialist economics, and his book would have to be greatly improved to be considered shabby history. He took literally Balzac's dictum that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime," and assumed that wealth was by its very nature felonious.

There's no disputing that the poor often had a rough time of it during America's race through industrialization. One need not rehearse the hardships of the meatpacking industry to know that. But acknowledging this need not require buying into all the conspiratorial nonsense written into the Left's psyche. Populists and socialists have a well-documented tendency to see villainous human agents behind superficially unwelcome historical forces. If a worker has a grievance, it must be because a bad man in a room somewhere wants it thus. The 1892 Populist platform captured this spirit nicely when it warned that "a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking over the world." This sort of thinking is inherent to any doctrine that places "class interests" at the center of political explanation. Marx may have championed the cold impersonal forces of history, but Marxists always see string-pullers, Shylocks, and "robber barons" behind the curtain.

The irony is that, if one actually looks at them through a colder, more impersonal prism, the so-called robber barons were actually great for the poor in the long run. From 1890 to ...