War profiteering
A war profiteer is any person or organization that derives unreasonable profit from warfare or by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war. The term typically carries strong negative connotations. General profiteering, making a profit criticized as excessive or unreasonable, also occurs in peacetime. An example of war profiteers were the "shoddy" millionaires who allegedly sold recycled wool and cardboard shoes to soldiers during the American Civil War. Some have argued that major modern defense conglomerates like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, and Raytheon fit the description in the post-9/11 era. This argument is based in the political influence of the defense industry, for example in 2010 the defense industry spent 22.6 million to congressional candidates, as well as large profits for defense company shareholders in the post-9/11 period. There were a number of food riots during the American Revolution against profiteering merchants, there were more than thirty riots in the period between 1776 and 1779. In 1777 a mob of Boston women beat the merchant Thomas Boylston and confiscated his stock for hoarding coffee and sugar to drive up the price. In East Hartford, Connecticut a mob of twenty women and three men took 218lbs of sugar from a Mr. Pitkin's. In Beverly, Massachusetts a mob of 60 women and some additional men forced local merchants to charge the same price for sugar in American paper money and gold coin. Interchangeable parts In 1798, American inventor Eli Whitney received a government contract to manufacture 10,000 muskets in less than two years. After failing to produce a single musket, he was called to Washington to defend his expenditure of the treasury funds before a committee that included both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Believing to demonstrate the ingenuity of interchangeable parts, Whitney earned widespread support and has been incorrectly credited with inventing the idea of interchangeable parts.
