“[Ford’s] … decision to computerize its workers is one of the two truly enlightened institutional initiatives of my lifetime. The other was the G.I. Bill, whose beneficial effects we continue to feel in this country, even after a half-century.
“I think Ford’s decision, once it finds imitators and takes global hold (as I have no doubt it will), may prove no less reverberant. Socially and financially. It isn’t just the workers, you see, it’s their children who will reap the great benefit. Children all around the world.
“How fitting that this remarkable, rich, enlightened, providential gesture should be made by the descendants in authority of the first Henry Ford, who — way back when — grasped the truth that if he paid his workmen $5 a day, they would be able to buy the cars they were building and make him even wealthier. And they did.
“What Ford has done epitomizes what Tocqueville meant when he suggested that the singular genius of this great nation was for ‘self-interest rightly understood.’ Taken all in all, what Ford is doing deserves a Nobel Prize, if not for peace, then for something. It makes me proud to be an American.”
But as Thomas’s drum-and-bugle corps fades in the distance, I still have to wonder: What’s the catch here?
Carl
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