I suddenly remembered that I'd run across Andrew Carnegie's essay on
"Wealth" [1] back in April [2], and some of my arguments here have
merely echoed his from over a century ago. He had a bit more moral
righteousness to him, the "gospel of wealth" and all that, but then
again, he did have the courage of his convictions: he managed to
give a substantial part of his fortune in his lifetime, and perhaps
had been planning on outliving 84 in order to dispose of the rest.
-Dave
[1] _North American Review_ (June 1889), pp. 653-664.
<http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/MOA/MOA-JOURNALS2/NORA8089.html>
[2] <http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/apr99/0163.html>
[3] "Distant Possessions: The Parting of Ways" (Aug 1898 NAR) has
Carnegie's prediction that the US and (then pre-revolutionary) Russia
would be the two powers least in danger of wiping themselves out in
squabbles over foreign possessions. Depending upon how you look at it,
it either took a half century or only two such conflicts for him to
have been proved correct.