Intro

This is a business, or it was.

Now it’s one small part of a massive operation that spans the globe. The business has factories in China and India, design offices in California, sells its products in every continent but Antarctica, and…it has a dozen employees in Ireland.

And that is a problem.

Because here, in Ireland, is where the business somehow pays most of its taxes, where it owes a a tiny percentage of its corporate profits.

The business is Apple. The business is Microsoft. The business is Google, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, and Coca-Cola. (K)

The business is the modern multi-national corporation, and every year

this costs the world half a trillion dollars, that instead of going to the countries and communities that these companies are built on, go straight into the pockets of the world’s already fabulously wealthy. (L) And it’s all possible because,

look at it, this financial Frankenstein is bigger than any country. It spans the globe, and no one country can rein the monster in, make it pay its fair share.

Want them to pay higher taxes? Someone else will be happy to take…1%.

Want them to pay their workers a decent wage? Someone else will let them do slavery.

Want them to stop dumping cancer in the rivers? Someone else will take the bribes and look the other way.

Because even though it would be in all these countries’ interests to put a stop to this, it’s in each individual country’s interest to take whatever deal they can get. This is the world in 2026.

But what if I told you this wasn’t a new problem? What if I told you you could replace all these countries with American states: coal mines in West Virginia, steel mills in Pennsylvania, offices in New Jersey, and railroads nationwide? And what if I told you the men who owned these businesses paid no taxes, abused their workers without punishment, and dumped pollution into the rivers, because no one state could stop them?

This is America in 1900. The national corporation was just invented, and individual states—where almost all politics happened—were left helplessly scrambling, until one man came along with a new vision for America’s future: Teddy Roosevelt.

His idea was simple: make politics national. Make the government bigger than the corporation again.

Once you see it, it seems so obvious! But back in Teddy’s day, this was a revolutionary idea. For decades, politicians had promised industrialization would make everyone richer, despite the widespread suffering deepening every day. Or they clamored for a return to the past: a breakup of big business and a return to localized economies. Nobody was thinking nationally.

Today, we face the same problem, with the same stupid politicians. Globalism was supposed to make us all rich, but so far it seems to have made an elect few insanely wealthy, while gutting good jobs across the country. And the only solution on offer, whether from Trump or Bernie seems to be to just…abandon globalism. But imagine Arkansas trying to just…opt out of the national economy. Nobody is thinking internationally.

Teddy gave us the blueprint 100 years ago. In his own words, “In a rich and complex industrial society…corporations become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality. It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals to combine [and] to act in their collective capacity through…the Government.” (M, ch. XIII)

In other words, we must make the government bigger than the corporation again. But of course, that’s easier said than done. So, this is the story of how Teddy made it happen, and how we can do the same thing again today.

And while this story is about one vital parallel between our own time and the corrupt Gilded Age of the late 1800s, there are a ton of other similarities.

MB: You might even say the 2020s are the 1890s!

Oh hey Mr. Beat! That’s right, and if you want to learn more about that, check out his video that just came out!

MB: After this video! Stay tuned, because you’ll be hearing from me again in a few minutes!

1870s: dysfunction

Our story starts in the 1860s with the railroads.

Trains offered the chance to unify America’s fragmented local economies, and whoever owned the rails could make it big. So everybody and their uncle jumped in on the craze. Soon, America was home to 45,000 miles of track. (A)

But there was a problem. Every single community had its own local rail startup and its own rules and regulations, if it had any.

The result was hundreds, if not thousands of companies all across the country building tracks with basically no coordination.

Different rail widths required different trains, while precious few lines actually connected between different states.

In turn, by the 1870s, the startups began failing…fast. Rail bankruptcies swept the nation, as the investment craze met with harsh reality and took the nation’s economy with it. (A)

But one rich coal mine owner named James J. Hill had an idea.

The issue was fragmentation. His solution was the opposite: consolidation. Railroad companies just had to get…bigger.

So, Hill snapped up a small failing Minnesota line for pennies in 1878. Within a few years, he snapped up another failed line, then another, all the while building out as much rail as he possibly could. By the middle of the 1880s, he had his eyes set on buying out his largest competitor: Northwest Pacific. (B)

If successful, this merger would mean, in Roosevelt’s words, “control of practically the entire railway system in the Northwest—possibly as the first step toward controlling the entire railway system of the country.” (M, ch. XII) Luckily for Hill though, Roosevelt wasn’t president just yet, and the government was still on Hill’s side…for now.

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Thank you, AnyDesk. Now, back to 1880.

1880s: Deregulation

So Hill has a scheme to take over the entire rail industry of the American northwest and maybe the rest of the country too. If successful, he’d single-handedly command a vital trade connection to the Pacific and be able to set exorbitant rates for the freight that needed his rails. His monopoly would be bad for consumers and deadly to competitive business.

And Hill wasn’t alone. Monopolies were spreading all over the place, springing up in practically every industry: in coal, steel, and oil, even tobacco and sugar. These were companies that owned 90, sometimes even 100% of entire industries in vital goods that everyone needed. (M, ch. XII)

So why did the government let all this consolidation happen? Well, they actually tried to stop it, but there were problems.

First, the states were practically helpless. These massive companies were just bigger than any one of them, and if threatened with penalties or high taxes, there were always other states willing to undercut each other for a dollar.

New Jersey, for example, amended its constitution in 1875 so that corporations could register in the state without paying basically any taxes on revenue in the state where they actually operated (C, 680-681).

Sound familiar? I hope so. And then, even when important states did try to do something, they got blocked by the Supreme Court.

Because big railroads crossed state lines, the Court ruled that states really couldn’t regulate their behavior, block mergers, or stop price-gouging, because the Constitution clearly tasks the federal government with regulating “interstate commerce.” (M, ch. XII)

But here’s the kicker. When the federal government passed a bill to rein in monopolies—the Sherman Antitrust Act—the Supreme Court said it couldn’t apply to Hill’s company and others like it. Because Hill and his business partners, including J.P. Morgan, these guys were clever.

Instead of just buying up other rail lines and forming one big company that could be targeted by the Sherman Act, Hill went around to all the companies he wanted to buy and offered to exchange stocks.

Hill gave them some stock in his rail company, and in exchange he took all the stocks in the other company.

In the process, he gained control of the businesses, but they technically remained separate companies. (M, ch. XII)

This structure, called the “national trust,” put the business in a legal grey area, and The Supreme Court said it didn’t constitute interstate commerce, meaning the federal government wasn’t allowed to regulate it, even if the trust controlled 100% of a nationwide industry! So not only were the states helpless in the face of these massive corporations, the one body who could do anything about it now wasn’t allowed to!

It was a catastrophe for American democracy—no matter who the people elected, at any level of government, they were completely blocked from having their voices heard. This was a crisis. It was so bad I can’t even explain it, so I’ll phone a friend to help me out.

1890s: crisis

Matt: Hello? Mr. Beat speaking.

Philip: Mr. Beat! Got a minute? I need YouTube’s favorite American history teacher to help explain the 1890s.

Matt: I’m so glad you trust me to get this right.

Philip: Oh, trust! [chuckle] Alright, well let’s start here. Tell us about these monopolies. Were these big businesses good for consumers?

Matt: So yeah, by the 1890s you had these big monopolies where basically one giant corporation was dominating a market and the way they were able to get so big was because rapid industrialization. The national economy was all tied together now thanks to railroads. And so it was easier for companies to make a lot of money using both horizontal integration, which just means one company's buying out the competition, or vertical integration, which means one company owns the entire supply chain. Am I right? A lot of price gouging going on. That's where we started to see ridiculously high prices. Big businesses were certainly not good for consumers.

Philip: What about for the workers who kept these big monopolies going?

Matt: Oh, the workers. Oh, man. This made it easier for the workers to get exploited. In the 1890s, factory workers faced long hours, low wages, freaking dangerous conditions. This led to massive strikes like the Homestead strike or the Pullman strike. big uprisings where you had violent confrontations.

Philip: So what did all this horrible stuff do to American politics?

Matt: Well, in response to these horrible working conditions and these monopolies, you did have a legit populist movement that sprung up. You had farmers that were frustrated with railroad and bank monopolies in the country. And then in the cities, you had workers frustrated with industrial monopolies. and they all joined forces to form what we call the populist party or people's party which was one of the most successful third party movements in American history. The populists were interesting because they called for things like making the wealthy pay more taxes, getting off the gold standard, which is kind of hard to relate to today, but you know, a bunch of other big reforms that ended up becoming part of the progressive era.

Philip: You know, this is starting to sound pretty familiar.

Matt: Unfortunately, you’re right! That’s why I made a whole video about the similarities between the 1890s and 2020s.

Philip: Well, that sounds like a great video. We’ll send our viewers your way after this. And Mr. Beat, this whole 1890s situation isn’t going to end well, is it?

Matt: Not at first, but eventually it turns out okay.

Philip: Okay, thanks for stopping by.

And he’s right. It didn’t end well, at first.

On September 6, 1901, an anarchist shot and killed President William McKinley at the World’s Fair. This was America at rock bottom. The killer hoped to spark a revolution.

Instead, he just helped make the one man president who had the vision to see America through this crisis peacefully: McKinley’s Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt.

1900s: Solution

We know a lot about Teddy.

His personality? Larger than life.

His imperialism? Reprehensible. (N)

His conservationism? Truly admirable.

Less is known, believe it or not, about Roosevelt’s most important achievement: how he managed this crisis of American democracy.

So I dug into his autobiography and speeches to get a sense of his perspective. The problem he saw was that, in his words,

“The power of the mighty industrial overlords of the country had increased with giant strides, while the methods of controlling them, or checking abuses by them, on the part of the people, through the Government, remained archaic and therefore practically impotent.” (M, ch. XII)

Roosevelt got the problem: these corporations had grown more powerful than their governments. But he didn’t want to go back, either:

“It is practically impossible…and undesirable to try to break up all [big businesses] merely because they are large and successful, and to put the business of the country back into the middle of the eighteenth century.” (M, ch. XV)

Times had changed. The Industrial Revolution had transformed America, and in some ways for the better. Railroads connecting the country boosted economic growth. Coal mining and steelmaking built more homes and kept them warmer. The future held promise, if it could be harnessed for the good of the public, rather than the good of the few.

Roosevelt attacked the problem with his typical energy. Remember the Sherman Antitrust Act, the bill to rein in monopolies that the Supreme Court shot down? Roosevelt wasn’t intent on taking no for an answer, so as soon as he took office, he sued to break up James J. Hill’s northwest rail monopoly and, hopefully, overturn the Supreme Court’s decision. (M, ch. XII)

It had only been six years since the Court gutted the Sherman Act, but things were so bad in America—horrific working conditions, massive inequality, widespread unrest, an anarchist assassinating the President—that the Court saw the writing on the wall. They had to comply.

So the Court gave way to Roosevelt. They ruled the federal government could break up big trusts and monopolies, and Hill’s rail trust was shattered. Now, the Federal Government truly had the power to navigate a way out of America’s crisis. Roosevelt didn’t relent. He continued to sue and sue and sue, using the Sherman Act to break up the country’s biggest and baddest monopolies that each controlled 90-plus-percent of their industries, like American Tobacco, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and others. (M, ch. XII)

Yet Roosevelt’s mission wasn’t just to break up businesses. His promise to the American people was the “Square Deal” — a series of policies that would make America fair again, competitive and innovative yet decent and egalitarian. (O)

This is why he established the US Forest Service and expanded the National Parks: to prevent a wealthy few from destroying America’s shared wilderness. It’s why he established the Food and Drug administration: to prevent a wealthy few from poisoning the American public. And it’s why he created the Department of Commerce and Labor: to prevent a wealthy few from gouging rail prices, busting up unions, and abusing workers. (P)

In Teddy's own words, “Our country - this great Republic - means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” (Q)

Recap

Roosevelt’s visionary square deal was the product of crisis. In fact, I think it’s the result of a pattern of politics that we still see today. So I just want to recap how Teddy got there real quick, because I think it will help us understand our own time.

In the 1860s, the industrial revolution and railroads promised to knit together the nation’s disparate economies. But localized politics and businesses weren’t capable of meeting the moment, and economic dysfunction and disaster followed in the 1870s. Innovation, then dysfunction.

Then, those with resources like James J. Hill saw a chance to consolidate control of industries. By the 1880s, businesses like his had gone national, forming trust companies. Meanwhile, politics was still local, leaving the government behind the ball: stuck in old ways built around the old economy. Innovation, dysfunction, then consolidation.

By the 1890s, the rich were getting richer, the American people were hurting, and democracy itself was threatened, as the people had no real means to correct course. By the turn of the century, crisis fully arrived, politics went crazy, and a President was shot in an effort to spark revolution. Innovation, dysfunction, consolidation, then crisis.

As deep as the crisis was, though, the problem was essentially simple. Corporations had gotten bigger than the government. Fixing it required clarity and courage, and luckily Teddy Roosevelt was the man for the job. He broke up some massive monopolies but more importantly he moved economic regulation up to the national sphere, matching the new scale of the country’s businesses. He made the government bigger than the corporation again, preserving innovation and growth while putting the people back in charge.

His policies were neither perfect nor seen through to their fullest conclusion, but they made a lot of people’s lives a lot better and restored some faith in the political system, staving off immediate crisis and collapse.

Comparison

So that’s the cycle: innovation, dysfunction, consolidation, crisis, and hopefully resolution. But where are we in that cycle today?

Teddy’s story began in 1860, but ours begins in 1960. After two world wars and a lot of improved ship and air transport technologies, the world was ready to trade more than ever before.

But the world wasn’t ready for multinational corporations. You see, to avoid another Great Depression, the United States and most other countries had agreed to restrict how much money their citizens could move across international borders. On the one hand, that was good. It meant that corporations stayed national, where voters could keep them in check (E, 556-557). But these rules kept the global economy fragmented and just as in the 1870s, this spelled trouble.

By the 1970s, dysfunction followed innovation, as the global economy, unable to keep up, went haywire with an energy crisis, high inflation, and slow growth.

In turn, the governments of the world decided to try to remove the fragmentation by letting go of the controls: allowing money to flow across borders and knit the world’s disparate national economies together.

Big businesses and the wealthy were best positioned to seize this opportunity, and they quickly did so. Private investment in manufacturing in low-income countries exploded. So too, did a new type of financial arrangement, whereby small countries slashed their corporate taxes. And, through clever shell companies, multinationals began parking their profits there. By the late 1980s, Ireland was quickly becoming one such popular destination. (G)

So by the 1990s, dysfunction had given way to consolidation, and the winning multinational corporations looked a whole lot like the national trusts of the 1890s, with no one capable of keeping them in check.

Then, between 1990 and 2006, the number of multinationals doubled, from 30,000 to 60,000 (F).

Now, like industrialization, globalization hasn’t been without benefits. During this period, global poverty has seen the largest drop in human history. Medical advances have been enormous. And digital communications have allowed the world’s brightest minds to collaborate like never before.

Still, these multinationals were abusing workers just like the industrialist of the 1890s: excessive hours, child labor, unsafe working conditions, even slavery. In fact, all of that is still business as usual at the mines and factories that these companies are built on. At the same time, this move toward overseas industry has also annihilated huge swathes of jobs back in these companies’ home countries.

In turn, we’re seeing the same sorts of crisis unfold as happened at the turn of the century.

Globalization ensured that the 2008 American housing crisis sank the whole world economy. Deindustrialization and rapid wealth consolidation has led to a new wave of populism. Political violence is surging. Governments are struggling from holes in their budgets created by multinationals’ tax avoidance.

In the 1890s and today, national and then multinational corporations have been able to leverage their enormity to get their way over the heads of average citizens like you and me. This isn’t just ethically wrong. It threatens the very foundations of social and political harmony. People do not like feeling disenfranchised and left out of the political process. They will take action to make a change. But those actions—whether assassinating presidents or supporting incompetent populists—can be as dangerous as the problem they’re attempting to solve.

Innovation, dysfunction, consolidation, crisis. We are in the crisis stage.

Lessons

And just as nobody was thinking nationally when states fell behind the national trust, nobody is thinking internationally, as countries fall further behind multinational corporations.

Trump, in both terms, has made a lot of noise about fixing globalization’s failures and bringing manufacturing back home. In his first term, he passed a tax law that did put a stop to American companies using one of Ireland's most obvious tax evasion tricks. But it also left plenty of loopholes open and created a few new ones too. And in this term, he’s mostly relied on tariffs.

Not only do his policies and tariffs simply not work — we actually lost jobs in manufacturing and construction in 2025 — this whole nationalist mentality is simply archaic.

Again, imagine Arkansas opting out of the industrialized national economy and returning to local agrarianism. I mean, okay! If you want to be really poor and probably taken over by somebody else in 50 years.

No, as Teddy Roosevelt understood, going back to a prior era is neither possible nor really desirable. Globalization and multinationals are not inherently bad. Reductions in global poverty and extraordinary technological innovations are proof of this.

This imbalance isn’t solved by breaking up big businesses and restoring the power of smaller government entities. Instead, the solution is to empower governments at the level that can best regulate corporations in the public interest and facilitate competitive — not consolidated — business.

In Teddy’s day, that meant a new nationalism. In his words,

“The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues.” (Q)

Today, though, it means internationalism. It means we must be impatient of the confusion that results from nations attempting to treat global issues as domestic issues. And thankfully, over the last ten years, many countries have actually agreed to a global minimum corporate tax.

The problem is way bigger than taxes, but it’s a starting point. If every country shared such a tax, it would prevent companies from playing countries against each other, bring some money back to the people who make all that private wealth possible, and give them some power to hold the powerful to account.

Yet, many countries, including the United States and—shocker—the worst-offending tax havens, have critically undermined this agreement by demanding carveouts for—you guessed it—American multinationals, which remain the most powerful, and worst, offenders in the system.

Cooperation is hard, because there’s a lot of money behind keeping us divided, and because for many, internationalism is a scary idea. People understandably fear being dwarfed by new, bigger forms of political association. But this is nothing new.

In the American Revolution, many feared banding the colonies together but the reality was simple: JOIN OR DIE. And in Teddy’s day his “nationalism” was denounced by many who feared a loss of local power would mean a loss of their own individual power in politics.

But by 1900, Roosevelt’s response was simple. “What local power?” National corporations had already dwarfed them. Nationalizing politics actually made each voter more powerful.

And today it’s the same. Those who fear internationalism claim it will violate sacred “national sovereignty.” But I ask, “what national sovereignty?”

Today corporations are running rough-shod over nations, just as they did over states in 1900.

Either we bind together to act in our common interest which knows no borders, or we simply fall further behind: victims of old prejudice who would rather live in fear, letting some lines on maps define the horizons of our future than seek to change them and free ourselves.

Obviously, that’s easier said than done. And obviously, this is a YouTube video, not a detailed program for how to establish functioning international legislative institutions. We don’t have all the answers, but there are no answers in fear. As Teddy said,

“In facing the future…we should be neither timid pessimists nor foolish optimists…Grave perils are yet to be encountered…There is every reason why we should recognize them, but there is no reason why we should fear them or doubt our capacity to overcome them, if only each will, according to the measure of his ability, do his full duty, and endeavor so to live as to deserve the high praise of being called a good American citizen.” (R)

Or perhaps today, a good global citizen.

Outro

Hey,

Both: thanks for watching.

Matt: And if you enjoyed that great video, consider helping them tell more stories that matter to democracy by joining their Patreon or grabbing some merch.

Philip: And don’t forget to check out Mr. Beat’s new video, on the many other similarities between the Gilded Age 1890s and the 2020s. It’s a great video and a really important comparison.

Matt: And if you stop by, leave a comment to let me know Spectacles sent you.

Sources

A. Richard Bensel*, The Political Economy of American Industrialization* (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

B. Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1991).

C. Christopher Grandy, “New Jersey Corporate Chartermongering, 1875-1929” in The Journal of Economic History 49 no. 3 (September 1989), p. 677-692.

D. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904, (Brown University Press, 1985)

E. Barry Eichengreen, “Bretton Woods After 50,” in Review of Political Economy 33 no. 4 (2021), pp. 552-569.

F. Gary Hoover, “Most Valuable Companies: The Last 25 Years,” American Business History Center.

G. P.D. Casteel, “Rise of Multinational Corporations,” EBSCO

H. Joseph Politano, “America is Losing Blue Collar Jobs,” in Apricitas Economics, 6 January 2026.

I. Brad Setser, “The Global Con Hidden in Trump’s Tax Reform Law, Revealed,” in The New York Times, 6 February 2019.

J. “US will be exempt from global tax deal targeting profits of large multinationals,” in The Guardian, 6 January 2026.

K. Carlos Waters, “Why Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer and other U.S. multinational corporations set up shop in Ireland,” in CNBC, 12 June 2025.

L. Eutax. “Global Distribution of Revenue Loss from Tax Avoidance: Re-Estimation and Country Results,” n.d. https://www.taxobservatory.eu/repository/global-distribution-of-revenue-loss-from-tax-avoidance/.

M. Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, 1913.

N. Katz, Jonathan M. Gangsters of Capitalism : Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022.

O. Theodore Roosevelt. “Address to the New York State Agricultural Association.” Presented at the Labor Day Annual Fair, 1903. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-new-york-state-agricultural-association-syracuse-ny.

P. Wikipedia Contributors. “Theodore Roosevelt.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, January 30, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt.

Q. Theodore Roosevelt. “The New Nationalism.” August 31, 1910. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/12/06/archives-president-teddy-roosevelts-new-nationalism-speech.

R. Theodore Roosevelt. “The Duties of American Citizenship.” January 26, 1883. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tr-citizen/.