A timely warning: The prophetic words of Rutherford B. Hayes.

Read this quote first, and then I’ll tell you about its provenance and why I chose to share it with you today.

“[I]t is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger—the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication.”

This quote comes from the daily diary of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 19th President of the United States, who was writing in 1887. Hayes’s record as President was mixed, to say the least, but there can be no doubt that he was deeply concerned with the conditions he saw in America, particularly income inequality, during and after his single troubled term in office. Hayes was writing from the Gilded Age, a period of unbridled avarice and greed that has few equals in American history—until the present day. You have to reflect only a moment upon modern conditions to appreciate how true Hayes’s words are in 2026. It goes beyond high-profile individual grifters like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, men that have wrought incalculable damage, suffering and hardship upon the people of the world from whom they have stolen so much. There are also the oil barons, the health care companies, the weapons manufacturers, the people behind the fulsome artificial intelligence boom, the employers who rob their employees of their wages and crush labor unions to prevent them from fighting back, and those who have deliberately thwarted efforts to solve global warming, the world’s biggest problem. The robber barons of 1887 about whom Hayes was so concerned were powerless peons compared to the people and corporations who hold and control most of the world’s wealth a century and a half later.

The year 2026 is nine days old. Already we’ve seen two high-profile events—the illegal military intervention in Venezuela and the brutal unprovoked murder of an innocent woman in Minneapolis by ICE stormtroopers—that should shock and appall every American for their sheer effrontery to the rule of law. I don’t intend to comment on these events more than this, except to note that these problems ultimately stem from exactly what Hayes was trying to warn us about back in 1887: the accumulation of too much money, and too much power, in the hands of too few people. He called it evil. He was right.

Hayes died in 1893. How much longer will we refuse to heed his words, and the similar sentiments of others that have been so often expressed since then? The most frustrating lesson from history is that those in power never learn from history.

The Value Proposition

Why should you be reading this blog, or receiving it as a newsletter? This is why.

☕ If you appreciate what I do, buy me a virtual coffee from time-to-time to support my work. I know it seems small, but it truly helps.

📖 You could also buy my newest book.

🎓 Like learning? Find out what courses I’m currently offering at my website.

📽 More the visual type? Here is my YouTube channel with tons of free history videos.