Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

by John Brooks

“EVERY nation has the government it deserves,” the French writer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre declared in 1811.

HYPOCRITICALLY egalitarian on the surface and systematically oligarchic underneath, unconscionably complicated, whimsically discriminatory, specious in its reasoning, pettifogging in its language, demoralizing to charity, an enemy of discourse, a promoter of shop talk, a squanderer of talent, a rock of support to the property owner but a weighty onus to the underpaid, an inconstant friend to the artist and scholar—if the national mirror-image is all these things, it has its good points as well. Certainly no conceivable income-tax law could please everybody, and probably no equitable one could entirely please anybody;