Con artist?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Con artist?

It seems that con artists, for all their vices, represent many of the virtues that Americans aspire to. Con artists are independent and typically self-made. They don’t have to kowtow to a boss—no small thing in a country in which people have always longed to strike out on their own. They succeed or fail based on their wits. They exemplify, in short, the complicated nature of American capitalism, which, as McDougall argues, has depended on people being hustlers in both the positive and the negative sense. The American economy wasn’t built just on good ideas and hard work. It was also built on hope and hype.

In the nineteenth century especially, the line between crook and businessman was fuzzy. Take the building of the American railroads, which both spurred industrialization and laid the foundation for a truly national economy. When the Central Pacific Railroad (the western spur of the transcontinental railroad) was built, the four men who started it, including Leland Stanford, set up an outside construction company in which they were the sole shareholders, and used that company to milk the Central Pacific for tens of millions of dollars in excess construction costs. The building of the Union Pacific Railroad led to the same kind of self-dealing and pocket-lining and reckless overbuilding, while railroad financiers like Jay Gould made enormous sums via stock schemes and dubious takeovers. The result was one of the biggest cons the country has ever seen, with huge losses for investors and huge fortunes for the moguls. Still, we ended up with a national transportation system.