The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

good barons 495put forward in the tale that Rockefeller and Rogers fooled the stock market.The new company did not fall in value when they cleared out, and in factthey did not clear out entirely, as Heilbroner to the contrary implies. Theysold only half the stock, and would therefore have had no interest in allowingits market value to fall. It didn’t. The company was now correctly valued,the barons getting their profit from alertness.They bought it without having the money in the bank, and persuadedthe seller to wait to cash the check. So what? There is nothing unusualabout this, in capitalism or out. True, Rockefeller and Rogers were condemnedat the time by the financial community. But it’s hard to see anythingbut envy as a basis for the condemnation: “Why didn’t we think ofthat?” On the seller’s side it was an open-eyed deal. The seller was extendingcredit to Rockefeller and Rogers, credit which they deserved to have.They had shown themselves to be smart cookies, and anyway had StandardOil to back them. If the seller thought that Anaconda was worth only $39million, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t accommodate the buyers byholding the check uncashed for a while, if he knew them to be reliablechaps, as he did. Indeed they quickly showed they were both smart and reliable,by covering the check and then by promptly repaying the bank loanthat had covered it.The Anaconda deal was routine, the same you enter when you buy anybusiness—say, a house on speculation—and finance the purchase with aloan. If you have been correct in your assessment that the market will valuethe business more than you paid for it, then you can cash in your capitalgain right away by reselling the business and paying off the loan. Rockefellerand Rogers were correct, and did cash in. That’s not bad. That’s good. Companiesshould be correctly valued, or else their real assets will be poorlyemployed. In the matter of Anaconda, William Rockefeller and HenryRogers were good barons, not robbers.The American experience with capitalist fortunes has been odd, intertwinedwith the peculiarly devout American attitude toward God. Fully 96 percentof Americans profess a belief in God, exceeded in this only by Nigeria, Brazil,South Africa, Ireland, Poland, and Northern Ireland. 18 It was well said in the1980s that the two most religious countries in the world were the IslamicRepublic of Iran and . . . the United States of America. Or alternatively that