A while back, I was talking to a guy who insisted that “trusts were the ultimate hypocrisy of lassiez-faire capitalism” and pointed at Vanderbilt’s railroad empire as a prime example of this. I’m not much of a rhetorician, so I wanna hear how you guys would refute this claim. What would the free market do in response to trusts? Also, was Vanderbilt (and other historical characters like Rockefeller) a product of unfettered capitalism, or was there an oversimplification being made?