the Machine has become...
Well scumbag robber barons like Andrew Carnegie look positively communist:
Andrew Carnegie insisted that the libraries he helped to create were kept 'free'. He was concerned that later cuts in municipal budgets could lead to admission charges for library use.
The Trustee's of such libraries had to accept a form of agreement which specifically stated "The Library shall be free to the people forever........."
In many of these libraries he insisted that the word "Free" be engraved in stone on the building to ensure that the library would always be free to the public.Carnegie Free Library Foundation"...Carnegie also believed that achievement of financial success could be reduced to a simple formula, which could be duplicated by the average person. In 1908, he commissioned (at no pay) Napoleon Hill, then a journalist, to interview more than 500 high and wealthy achievers to find out the common threads of their success. Hill eventually became a Carnegie collaborator, and their work was published in 1928, after Carnegie's death, in Hill's book The Law of Success (ISBN 0879804475) and in 1937 in Hill's most successful and enduring work, Think and Grow Rich (ISBN 1593302002). The latter has not been out of print since the day it was published and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. (In 1960, Hill published an abridged version of the book containing the Andrew Carnegie formula for wealth creation. For years it was the only version generally available. In 2004, Ross Cornwell published Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised, which restored the book to its original form, with slight revisions, and added the first comprehensive endnotes, index, and appendix the book had ever contained.).."
CarnegieThe ironic part is that Carnegie and many others, the early liberal reformers, believed that if the downtrodden (like homeless people) had access to literacy and books, then they would then be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Carnegie and others were were concerned at the time that the worker was spending his time being taught by commies and reformers who were teaching them to read seditious unAmerican 'commie' stuff and not enough of the good old practical business stuff that would turn them all into successful little businessman.
I point this out that EVEN given the fact that some of the motives of Carnegie and his ilk was to 'control' what the masses read, they NONETHELESS were far more charitable than what passes for 'liberalism' these days.
(On a personal note: I find it galling here as elsewhere that rightwing jerks like to think of themselves as Progressives and then lecture, when they don't they know jackshit about the history of the Left, the don't EVEN know the history of Liberalism!