Competition Among Capitalists

“Through competition among capitalists, capital itself is every year more effective in production, and tends ever to increasing abundance. Under its working the commodities that have been the luxuries of one generation become the comforts of the next and the necessities of the third….The plane of what constitutes a comfortable subsistence is constantly rising, and as the years go by greater and greater numbers attain this plane.”

--19th century cotton magnate Edward Atkinson, quoted by Jonah Goldberg in National Review, “Your ‘Robber Barron,’ My American Hero”