Why Can you Have Any Car as Long as it is Black?

A fully updated Chapter 20 of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom

The fully updated edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom will be available in January 2025. Over the coming months, paid subscribers can access (and provide feedback on) some of the updated chapters as I post them here. Chapter 3, Chapter 5, Chapter 11, Chapter 15 and Chapter 36 are already available. Please consider a paid subscription to access them as well as my twice-weekly content, including columns, guest essays, interviews and summaries of the latest research.

---

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel.

Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, and Henry vowed that his life would be different. Soon after establishing the Frick Coke Company, though, disaster struck – and it seemed that Henry would follow in his father’s footsteps. A financial crisis in 1873 had reduced the price of coke to 90 cents per ton and Henry’s business partners wanted out. But Henry chose to stay on, wrote a letter to an old family friend, Andrew Mellon, and received a loan of $10,000. For him, depressions were times of expansion; with his new loan he bought out his partners and acquired several coal mines from timid competitors at very low prices. And just as Henry had predicted, the panic did not last; within a few years the coke price had recovered to $4 per ton. By the time he was thirty, in 1879, Henry was a millionaire.