disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford. In academe, the education division of the National Endowment for the Humanities has prepared a lesson plan for schools asking whether "robber baron" or "captain of industry" is the better terminology. They state:In this lesson, you and your students will attempt to establish a distinction between robber barons and captains of industry. Students will uncover some of the less honorable deeds as well as the shrewd business moves and highly charitable acts of the great industrialists and financiers. It has been argued that only because such people were able to amass great amounts of capital could our country become the world's greatest industrial power. Some of the actions of these men, which could only happen in a period of economic laissez faire, resulted in poor conditions for workers, but in the end, may also have enabled our present day standard of living.This debate about the morality of certain business practices has continued in the popular culture, as in the performances in Europe in 2012 by Bruce Springsteen, who sang about bankers as "greedy thieves" and "robber barons". During the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, the term was used by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in his attacks on Wall Street. The metaphor has also been used to characterize Russian businessmen allied to Vladimir Putin. The leaders of Big Tech companies have all been described as being modern-day robber barons, particularly Jeff Bezos because of his influence on his newspaper, The Washington Post. Their rising wealth and power stands in contrast with the shrinking middle class. In contrast, Burton W. Folsom argues that the robber barons were either political entrepreneurs (who lobby government for subsidies and monopoly rights), or market entrepreneurs (who innovate and reduce costs to provide the best good or service at the lowest price). Political entrepreneurs do long-term harm to the economy with their monopolies and subsidies. This provides politicians with a pretext to insist that increased planning and increased regulation is the appropriate remedy. List of businessmen labelled as robber barons The people here are listed in Josephson, Robber Barons or in the cited source. John Jacob Astor (real estate, fur) – New York Andrew Carnegie (steel) – Pittsburgh and New York William A. Clark (copper) – Butte, Montana Jay Cooke (finance) – Philadelphia Charles Crocker (railroads) – California Daniel Drew (finance) – New York Jeff Bezos (technology, retail) -