The business cycle, Carnegie argue, was not an accident or anyone's fault: it was a fact of life and provision should be made for it. In order for the economy to expand, credit has to be created. Hence 'when the banking system contracts, not all the credit can be honored.' Absolute virtue, therefore, resides with the men who has cash during depressions - then he can buy labor and materials rock-low. In any efficient industry, he added, cost - and price - cutting must be continuous, but depressions provided the finest opportunities.
His firm was pure meritocracy. He paid his managers the highest wages in US industry. He notes in his Autobiography that attracting the best men is like buying the best machinery - the most expensive labor tends to be the only sort worth hiring because in a free market its high productivity is the only reason for its high price.
The only decent motive for the production of wealth was the betterment of mankind. This could be brought about best in a republican democracy like the United States, where the means existed for money to be poured into progressive purposes with a reasonable chance of it benefiting the man. In Triumphant Democracy (1885), he extolled the US system: 'The Old nations of the earth creep at a snail's pace. The Republic thunders past with the rush of an express.'
In his essay on 'Wealth', he argued that it was morally acceptable to become rich: what was reprehensible was to hang onto it - 'The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.'
In 1892 Carnegie founded Carnegie Hall for the performing arts. In 1902 he endowed the Carnegie Institution to further research. He set up the Carnegie Institution for the Advancement of Teaching (1905) and the Carnegie Corporation (1911) to support programs in the sciences and humanities. In 1919 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie, which showed that $350,695,653.40 had then been spent on a huge variety of projects. They included the construction of 2,811 free public library buildings and the purchase of 7,689 church organs. By the time he died, in his sleep, in his eighty-fourth year, he had disposed of virtually everything he possessed, and he was buried at Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, New York, next to Washington Irving. That Carnegie got his point across is attested by the fact he was granted the freedom of fifty cities spread across the United States.
Carnegie was a more important man than any president from Lincoln to Wilson.
