And I well know that many see that house and see abuses, see crime, see theft, see injustice and unfairness. I think it might serve as the basis of an interesting thought experiment comparing Capitalism–to the extent we have it–and Socialism.
When it was built, from 1890 to 1895, it employed hundreds of skilled workmen, the talents and energies of two of the best architectural minds of that era, and bought, from near and far, large quantities of materials which were sold for profit by those providing them.
It spread wealth, in other words.
Once occupied, it employed hundreds of domestics, paying, as they noted, New York wages in rural North Carolina, making employment there a highly sought after opportunity.
And I suspect that today it employs even more people than it did back then. You have a ticket office. You have the same numbers of groundskeepers. You have someone standing in nearly every room.
And outside the gates, there is an entire village devoted to cashing in on the tourist traffic. You have nice cafes and steak houses, and gift shops and art galleries.
That home, in other words, was from its inception to the present moment an engine of economic opportunity, of wealth, of employment. It was and is productive of all the material comforts which attend prosperity, for every layer of the community. Someone owns the cafe where I had an excellent Florentine and eclair. They will be called Capitalist. But people work there, and work there only because that cafe exists.
Let us run this experiment in reverse. Let us say that Socialists had seized power and confiscated the allegedly ill gotten wealth of George Vanderbilt, and handed it out on the streets in tens and twenties until it was all gone.
The home disappears. Those construction workers are never employed. The architects lose their contracts. The domestics remain impoverished in homes with dirt floors. The village is never built, the jobs of people working there are never created.
In short, a system of wealth production and sharing is never conjured into being. It is killed before it can sprout and bloom.
The precise defect of Socialism is that it kills things before they can come into being. Since most people are stupid, since most people do not see what COULD have been, but never was, they continue to fail to see how destructive it is. Their energies are engaged in tearing down, not seeing that they hurt themselves and their posterity in that very process.
Capitalism is the goose that lays golden eggs. Unfettered trade and innovation create more of the same, generalizing wealth. Fettered trade, and the punishment of new ideas, create poverty. If you look at most of the world, most of the poverty you see is, at root, the result of some combination of resentment, greed for gain without corresponding effort, and simple sloth.
And what were the advantages that the Vanderbilts enjoyed? They had indoor plumbing, but now we all do. They had people to cook their meals, but are we not in effect employing the labors of servants whenever we go out to eat, which was rare in that age, but ubiquitous now? We can pay people to do our laundry, to clean our homes, to mow our lawns, and these are very affordable services, even if most choose to do their own work.
In short, as a result of the very imperfect operation of free markets–wealth creation being undermined by those who create and debase our currency and the public wealth–most of us enjoy comforts only afforded the elites of bygone eras.
Even the Roman emperors used chamber pots. Ponder that.