This Sounds Familiar

Bloomberg looks at the Panic of 1893:

Outgoing President Benjamin Harrison and his men had presided over what they dubbed a “businessman’s administration.” The nation’s industrial giants ran their corporations without the nuisance of foreign competition, thanks to a high tariff wall the Republicans had maintained since 1861. Safe behind this wall, men like Andrew Carnegie and J.D. Rockefeller could carve up markets and charge whatever prices they wanted. When workers and farmers complained that high prices were ruining them, the Republican Congress responded in 1890 by raising rates even higher. The Harrison administration had been “beyond question the best businessman’s administration the country has ever seen,” the members of one Republican business association insisted.
Farmers and workers agreed, and they turned away from the Republican Party. In 1892, voters re-elected Democrat Grover Cleveland (who had already served a term as president from 1885 to 1889) to the White House on a promise to reform the tariff that protected big business. They also elected a Democratic Congress.
Republicans were outraged. The Democrats would destroy the economy, they predicted. Their policies would throw people out of work. The unemployed would starve in the streets. But, the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune mused, “perhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson.”
Businessmen set out to teach it to them. Although economic indicators remained steady, Republicans trumpeted that businessmen feared a coming catastrophe. The Democrats had only won with the votes of “socialists and anarchists,” Republican Senator Henry Teller of Colorado railed. Such men would deliberately create rampant inflation to wipe out their debts. Or they might slice away the tariffs altogether, throwing industry into a global market where foreign competition would instantly undercut it. Businesses would fail overnight. Newspapers warned investors to avoid stocks, which could only plummet under the new administration.

Have businessmen always been whiners? Businesses are raking in record profits, but you'd think Stalin was at the gates.  It really gets tiring.  However, just like in 2010, voters reward assholes who make things worse.