Of special importance to discussions of business ethics is the fact that anti-business philosophies have shaped most historical discussions of business. The view that capitalism's history is, for example, a story of "robber barons" who grew rich by "exploiting the poor" has gained wide acceptance.
Several good books challenge this these myths. Burton Folsom, Jr.'s The Myth of the Robber Barons is a study of six 19th-century American business leaders: Commodore Vanderbilt, J.J. Hill, the Scrantons, Charles Schwab, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon. Folsom makes the crucial distinction between "market entrepreneurs" and "politcal entrepreneurs"—i.e., between those who make money by providing better and cheaper goods and services, and those who acquire money by the use of political pull— and he shows how those who actually created wealth did so without government help and, in many cases, by out-competing rivals who were supported by huge government subsidies. Friedrich Hayek's Capitalism and the Historians is a collection of essays by five economic historians comparing the actual achievements of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution with the accounts given by historians. Gerald Gunderson's The Wealth of Creators is a well-written economic history of the United States, focusing on the important role entrepreneurs have played in developing the country.
