The Wild Wheel, by Garet Garrett (HC, 1952, $8, which is 1/3 the internet price.)
In 1914, Henry Ford did something so radical that most people thought him crazy. He raised the minimum wage to $5 a day for all employees down to the floor sweepers, and lowered the work day from eight hours to nine.
"The secret of Ford's prodigious achievement lay in what he did with his profits. He shared them with labor by paying high wages, and with his customers by continuously reducing the price of the automobile, and then, but for a relatively small part declared as dividends on the stock, all the rest year after year was returned to the business to buy more and better machines to make more and more automobiles at less and less cost."
Garrett states his strong belief in the concept of laissez faire, and his anger at it having been left behind. He mourns the coming of organized labor and the unions, of taxes of all sorts, and of all the Federal Trade Commission regulations. As the author writes, "Laissez Faire did not survive Henry Ford. It was betrayed by its friends... You may like it better this way... [but] if Laissez Faire had not begotten the richest world that ever existed there would have been much less for the welfare state to distribute."
An interesting point of view, and one more people have agreed with in the last decades. Read this book and decide what you think. Avail. 12/3.
