Carl Remick wrote:
> Following is an excerpt from Michael Thomas’s column in the current NY
> Observer. Thomas’s Stars-and-Stripes-Forever ending here is a bit much, but
> I agree that Ford’s decision to give its global workforce Internet access is
> a rara avis for sure – a genuinely enlightened corporate act:
>
> “[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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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu