Dear Dr. Bones,
Would you, Dr. Bones, or one of the Muses, happen to remember who the original "in-one-lesson" Peruna salesman was? I think vaguely of Henry Hazlitt, but so vaguely that it would be easy to be quite wrong.
And, speaking of "quite wrong,"
| Reviving Caring Capitalismjconway | Mon, Sep 3, 2012 1:04 PM EST This Op-Ed from today’s edition (sic) illustrates where America was and what we can do to get back. Henry Ford, no socialist, realized that if his employees could afford to buy his cars it would help his business, other executives in a variety of sectors followed. Most making executives made “only” 4-5 times what their employees made, paid very high income and estate taxes, and viewed themselves collectively as pillars of their community and country. The idea of an American CEO making millions off the backs of American workers and consumers and then high tailing his citizenship to another country would have been anathema in another era and is common place today. Just compare todays Governor Romney to the Governor Romney in the 1960s who as a CEO made small, affordable cars right here in the US instead of just manipulating money like his son. The best quote from the OP ED (sic [1] ) Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today.In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors. It is high time for the President to harness this spirit that drove Midcentury capitalism and the liberal political consensus-in both parties (when even the 1956 and 1960 Republican platforms called for socialized insurance, ‘progressive’ taxation and increased unionization) and highlight some of the companies that still follow this model-Costco, Mondragon Inc, the Evergreen Cooperative, In and Out Burger, and many others. Recommended by christopher, jasiu, kbusch, liveandletlive, paulsimmons, petr. |
As you can see, the sky-blue nobility and gentry have turned out en masse to subscribe this pious tripe and viennasausage.
And the moral of that is, Volks can sincerely think they are soaring when they are sinking. And not just anyvolks, mind you, but our own Aunt Nitsy along with a small zoo of probable H*rv*rds. Plus Comrade Hedrick Smith, who actually barbecued the tripe in question. As The Master did not say, "Let the cooks, not the guests, be the judges of the feast."
(( Perhaps home-aching could start at school, where, as I recall, we were supposed to mention the name of the author of the goodstuff we scribbled onto 3"-by-5" cards. I daresay that musty practice will have gone out the window with Dean Whatzizname in ’69 and the oblongus pie. Since, however, at present Ye Goode Olde Dayes are that in which we wallow, ¿perhaps an obol for Auld Lange Syne? ))
As usual when Their Worships start gertting to me, Eye tends to lapse into whightist-like attitudes, as for instance reflecting that it is easy to see how a 'jconway' might find practical bicycle parking a challenge. I doubt it does much good to glower at the refractory two-wheeler and observe "It is high time for the President to stable this steed . . ." &c. Without, that is, the faintest hint that one has any idea how the trick is to be done. "Shut your eyes and clap your hands and tomorrow will be Wednesday, 31 September 1957" does not sound very promising. But Houdini knows best.
St. Rudyard of Kiplin’ made his self-sorrowful civil engineer complain that the Government of India was under the impression that bridges are cut out of paper; the jconwayesque notion of what History is made of must be pretty similar. Paddy and Eye do not mind the "social construction" line of patter that drives many whightist intellectualoids up the wall, but perhaps as against ‘jconway’ the Redarkenment may have a point. Viewed from the sane side, this point is that few suppose that to say "The Pyramids are a human construction" implies they could be moved to Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie FL in twenty-four hours. The flip side is that the fact the transfer would take a cast of thousands six to eight weeks on a cost-plus basis scarcely proves that extraterrestrials must have built the damn things. Or that they grew there like Topsy.
There are reasons, that is, why Baincappin’ now differs from the well-tailfinned Ikecapitalism of 1957 and reasons also why the one changed into the other. And these are tolerably weighty reasons, for all that they have nothing to do with either Enthusiasm or Superstition. To say that we can re-institute Ikecapitalism, or Fordianity, or ¿why not the Holy Roman Empire of the Yankee Nation?, any time we like because, after all, these arrangements did exist once, a well-attested fact which establishes that they are not logically or physically impossible -- to talk like that is not exactly false, but, for bicycle-parking purposes, I fear it might as well be. Should you actually try to get there from here, you would not make it in this lifetime.
Happy days.
--JHM
___
[1] Mister Poster "doubles down" on the void where his Intellectual Bottom ought to be.
| September 2, 2012When Capitalists CaredBy HEDRICK SMITHWashington IN the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day. Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts. This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today. The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well-being ran in tandem. Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family. “The job of management,” he wrote, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups,” which he defined as “stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.” Earl S. Willis, a manager of employee benefits at General Electric, declared that “the employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer’s most productive asset.” From 1948 to 1973, the productivity of all nonfarm workers nearly doubled, as did average hourly compensation. But things changed dramatically starting in the late 1970s. Although productivity increased by 80.1 percent from 1973 to 2011, average wages rose only 4.2 percent and hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose only 10 percent over that time, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. At the same time, corporate profits were booming. In 2006, the year before the Great Recession began, corporate profits garnered the largest share of national income since 1942, while the share going to wages and salaries sank to the lowest level since 1929. In the recession’s aftermath, corporate profits have bounced back while middle-class incomes have stagnated. Today the prevailing cut-to-the-bone business ethos means that a company like Caterpillar demands a wage freeze and lower health benefits from its workers, while posting record profits. Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyperconcentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t. In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interest.” In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors. Today, we are all paying the price for this shift. As Ford recognized, if average Americans do not have secure jobs with steady and rising pay, the economy will be sluggish. Since the early 1990s, we have been mired three times in “jobless recoveries.” It’s time for America’s business elites to step beyond political rhetoric about protecting wealthy “job creators” and grasp Ford’s insight: Give the middle class a better share of the nation’s economic gains, and the economy will grow faster. Our history shows that. Hedrick Smith, a former correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, is the author of “Who Stole the American Dream?” |
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