After reading John Bogle's criticism of our agency society, I came across a similar critique by P.A. Sorokin. The quote below is from his book, The Crisis of Our Age, originally published in 1941.
"When the builders of the great industrial and financial empires--the Rothschilds and Morgans, the Rockefellers and Fords, the Carnegies and Cecil Rhodses--were amassing huge fortunes, they were entitled to them: they were risking their fortunes and lives in carving empires out of the wilderness. The managerial aristocracy of present-day corporations are in the position of the decadent descendants of a full-blooded political aristocracy: they retain and even augment all the privileges of their forefathers without rendering a comparable service to society."