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Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

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Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#61

Post by jbooth »

jswinghammer wrote: post #42
jbooth wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"proto-New Deal policies?" As I understand it, Hoover was preoccupied with maintaining a balanced federal budget through budget cuts and tax increases. That's the opposite of countercyclical spending, which along with some welfare state components made up the new deal. Maybe he was on board with the welfare state and the idea of people having high wages (who isn't?), but the government doesn't cut the majority of pay…

With all due respect that's because you haven't read more on the subject. Lord Keynes himself is quoted in Rothbard's book as approving of the United States government's response to the crisis. The notion that depressions are caused by a fall in aggregate demand is looking totally at the symptoms of the crisis and not the causes. Rothbard might be one person but he's not a minor figure in 20th century economics by an…

You were doing awesome until "seizing of all gold" -- obviously had a viewpoint but were giving credence to other viewpoints as well.. then that doozy. History forgives him because he ended the depression, won WWII and not everyone agrees with you about abolishing the gold standard being equivalent to quote "seizing of all gold".

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#62

Post by JoeAltmaier »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #37
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He ran a "company town" - had stores, sold them lumber to build houses etc. Most of the money came right back to him.

It only came back to him if the company stores wildly overcharged his employees. If an employee spent $100 in a store with a 10% markup, Ford still lost a net of $90. Do the math - paying your workers "enough to buy your product" is an utterly flawed business model. It might work incidentally (i.e., high wages might attract high productivity employees), but it doesn't work as stated.

Of course his employees are not his entire business model. But it sure improves margins, increases volume so economies of scale work better etc.

Note the evangelical nature of his argument - it all works better if everybody else does it too. He understood that perfectly.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#63

Post by timwiseman »

anamax wrote: post #59
jbooth wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, respectfully, the entire thought process displayed by your post seems to consist of "government = bad, therefore new deal = bad". It shows very little effort to understand what was actually happening, it boxes a huuuuuge range of possibilities into a simple black/white viewpoint, and it's a silly oversimplification that has high correlation with modern republicans. As far as what the majority of historians s…

> As far as what the majority of historians said, if it's them or you, and you're not saying something very very persuasive, I'll tend to believe them. Why? The last time I looked, nothing about history was subject to "nature". If all historians agreed that Hitler had 7 arms and flew, nothing bad would happen. If, on the other hand, engineers decided to act as if steel was less dense than air at 1 bar, things would g…

It depends on how that history is applied.

If a false understanding of history is applied in foreign relations, then there are situations where unnecessary wars can be created.

If a false understanding of history is applied to military strategy, wars can be needlessly lost.

There was a reason that the government created and spent so much on the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984. If you control people's understanding of history, you can have a big impact on what they do in the future.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#64

Post by timwiseman »

kiba wrote: post #36
jbooth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renegade viewpoint? Yeah, in absence of better proof provided, I'll stick with the opinion of the majority of historians. The rest of your points haven't had anything to do with government finances or the attitudes of both presidents towards countercyclical spending vs balanced budgets. They seem like some blindly-applied-backwards-80-years modern republican simplifications about the nature of "government programs"…

Yeah, in absence of better proof provided, I'll stick with the opinion of the majority of historians. What is your rationale for sticking with whatever the majority of historians said? The rest of your points haven't had anything to do with government finances or the attitudes of both presidents towards countercyclical spending vs balanced budgets. They seem like some blindly-applied-backwards-80-years modern republi…

What is your rationale for sticking with whatever the majority of historians said?

If I may, when the majority of experts in a field all believe the same thing, it is referred to as consensus. The consensus of the experts in any well researched field tends to be, if not actually right, at the very least the best answer that can be arrived at with current information.

Of course, they are not always right, even in a field as well grounded as mathematics, the consensus has been wrong in the past (the consensus for a very long time was the Euclidean Geometry was the only possible geometry.....). But it is quite reasonable to demand that someone trying to say the consensus is wrong has a high bar to meet to establish that.

In general, the most reasonable thing for someone without the expertise or interest to carefully do an indpendent analysis of all available data is to believe the consensus. When someone does meet that high bar to show that the consensus is wrong, then in any reasonable academic field that consensus will change.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#65

Post by brc »

jswinghammer wrote: post #2

This sort of thinking drove government policy at the start of the Great Depression. President Hoover tried to maintain high wage rates seeing them as the cause of prosperity and not the effect of greater productivity. Henry Ford was probably the most influential person in this camp but most of American business at the time was on board with it as well. Murray Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" has probably the b…

I think we can all pretty much agree that both Hoover and Roosevelt (and the administration in general) made things worse.

The biggest problem we have is the obsession with GDP instead of trying to measure things like wealth creation - which is precisely what Henry Ford was in the business of.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#66

Post by brc »

_delirium wrote: post #25
hop wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read his autobiography "My Life, and My Work" http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7213 Its fascinating. I think highly dyslexic is a better description than illiterate for Henry Ford, he was a genius. Pioneered material science, machining and forming metal cost effectively, made the assembly line, 161 patents, created enormous opportunity for hard working and smart people, brought cars to the masses. His politi…

I don't think his right-wing extremism can be explained away as a reaction to FDR or the impending war, since it goes back quite a bit earlier. He published The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem in 1920! It was actually the inspiration for parts of Mein Kampf (1923), which speaks approvingly of Ford and lifts some sections more or less directly from him. And, he met with and corresponded with Nazi repre…

It's always worse to look back and compare the actions of someone 100 years ago to what we would consider normal today. I'm not forgiving the guy, but you'd have to look around at some of his contemporaries and see if this type of behaviour was normal. Going further back, a lot of well-regarded American had slaves, for example.

A lot of people were friendly with the Nazis in the early-mid 1930's. They did turn Germany around and get it going in the early stages.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#67

Post by steveplace »

jbooth wrote: post #61
jswinghammer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect that's because you haven't read more on the subject. Lord Keynes himself is quoted in Rothbard's book as approving of the United States government's response to the crisis. The notion that depressions are caused by a fall in aggregate demand is looking totally at the symptoms of the crisis and not the causes. Rothbard might be one person but he's not a minor figure in 20th century economics by an…

You were doing awesome until "seizing of all gold" -- obviously had a viewpoint but were giving credence to other viewpoints as well.. then that doozy. History forgives him because he ended the depression, won WWII and not everyone agrees with you about abolishing the gold standard being equivalent to quote "seizing of all gold".

Gold standard and gold seizure are two different things.

Executive Order 6102 required U.S. citizens to deliver on or before May 1, 1933 all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act of October 6, 1917, as amended on March 9, 1933, violation of the order was punishable by fine up to $10,000 ($166,640 if adjusted for inflation as of 2008) or up to ten years in prison, or both.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#68

Post by euccastro »

jbooth wrote: post #61
jswinghammer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect that's because you haven't read more on the subject. Lord Keynes himself is quoted in Rothbard's book as approving of the United States government's response to the crisis. The notion that depressions are caused by a fall in aggregate demand is looking totally at the symptoms of the crisis and not the causes. Rothbard might be one person but he's not a minor figure in 20th century economics by an…

You were doing awesome until "seizing of all gold" -- obviously had a viewpoint but were giving credence to other viewpoints as well.. then that doozy. History forgives him because he ended the depression, won WWII and not everyone agrees with you about abolishing the gold standard being equivalent to quote "seizing of all gold".

[Edit: steveplace beat me to it. I'll leave this comment around for the reference.]

Abolishing the gold standard is not "equivalent" to "seizing of all gold". Both things just happened concurrently:

http://www.greatdepressiononline.com/gold-and-the-great-depr...

First, in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the U.S. Government, under the Gold Confiscation Act, confiscated gold money from its citizens and replaced it with paper Federal Reserve Notes. It became illegal for individuals to own gold, except for small quantities that coin collectors and dental practitioners could hold. This alone eliminated the public’s capacity to hold government inflation of the money supply in check; they could no longer redeem inflated paper money for gold.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#69

Post by nerfhammer »

anamax wrote: post #58
jbooth wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"proto-New Deal policies?" As I understand it, Hoover was preoccupied with maintaining a balanced federal budget through budget cuts and tax increases. That's the opposite of countercyclical spending, which along with some welfare state components made up the new deal. Maybe he was on board with the welfare state and the idea of people having high wages (who isn't?), but the government doesn't cut the majority of pay…

> As I understand it, Hoover was preoccupied with maintaining a balanced federal budget through budget cuts and tax increases. You got it backwards. In fact FDR campaigned against Hoover's deficit spending. Once in office, FDR reversed course and doubled-down on Hoover's approach. Hoover and FDR shared a belief that excess production was the problem - that's why both pushed govt programs to restrict it. That's what p…

Hoover began deficit spending only near the end of his presidency. Prior to that he drastically raised taxes and tried to balance the budget.
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