Henry Ford

“ Gold itself is not a valuable commodity. It is no more wealth than hat checks are hats. But it can be so manipulated, as the sign of wealth, as to give its owners or controllers the whip-hand over the credit which producers of real wealth require. Dealing in money, the commodity of exchange, is a very lucrative business. When money itself becomes an article of commerce to be bought and sold before real wealth can be moved or exchanged, the usurers and speculators are thereby permitted to lay a tax on production. ”

“ Those who believe that the people are so easily led that they would permit printing presses to run off money like milk tickets do not understand them. It is the innate conservation of the people that has kept our money good in spite of the fantastic tricks which the financiers play--and which they cover up with high technical terms.
The people are on the side of sound money. They are so unalterably on the side of sound money that it is a serious question how they would regard the system under which they live, if they once knew what the initiated can do with it. ”

“ The people must be helped to think naturally about money. They must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few.
Money, after all, is extremely simple. It is a part of our transportation system. It is a simple and direct method of conveying goods from one person to another. Money is in itself most admirable. It is essential. It is not intrinsically evil. It is one of the most useful devices in social life. ”

“ No financial system is good which favors one class of producers over another. We want to discover whether it is not possible to take away power which is not based on wealth creation. Any sort of class legislation is pernicious. I think that the country's production has become so changed in its methods that gold is not the best medium with which it may be measured, and that the gold standard as a control of credit gives, as it is now (and I believe inevitably) administered, class advantage. ”

“ Men will do business with one another. There will be money and there will be need of masters of the mechanism of money. Nothing is going to depart but the knots and tangles. There will be some readjustments, of course. Banks will no longer be the masters of industry. They will be the servants of industry. Business will control money instead of money controlling business. The ruinous interest system will be greatly modified. Banking will not be a risk, but a service. ”

“ If our reform should begin at the top it will require a social vision and an altruistic fervour of a sincerity and intensity which is wholly inconsistent with selfish shrewdness.
The wealth of the world neither consists in nor is adequately represented by the money of the world. ”

“ The hold which controllers of money are able to maintain on productive forces is seen to be more powerful when it is remembered that, although money is supposed to represent the real wealth of the world, there is always much more wealth than there is money, and real wealth is often compelled to wait upon money, thus leading to that most paradoxical situation--a world filled with wealth but suffering want. ”

“ It is only those who are unwise who will attempt to obstruct progress and thereby become its victims. All of us are here together, all of us must go forward together; it is perfectly silly for any man or class to take umbrage at the stirring of progress. If financiers feel that progress is only the restlessness of weak-minded persons, if they regard all suggestions of betterment as a personal slap, then they are taking the part which proves more than anything else could their unfitness to continue in their leadership. ”

“ They will seldom publicly admit it because they are afraid of their bankers. It required less skill to make a fortune dealing in money than dealing in production. The average successful banker is by no means so intelligent and resourceful a man as is the average successful business man. Yet the banker through his control of credit practically controls the average business man.
There has been a great reaching out by bankers in the last fifteen or twenty years--and especially since the war--and the Federal Reserve System for a time put into their hands an almost limitless supply of credit. ”

“ They will not act without adequate knowledge, and thus cause disaster, if a sincere effort is made to provide them with knowledge. The money question has first place in multitudes of minds of all degrees or power. But a glance at most of the cure-all systems shows how contradictory they are. The majority of them make the assumption of honesty among mankind, to begin with, and that, of course, is a prime defect. Even our present system would work splendidly if all men were honest. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the whole money question is 95 per cent. human nature; and your successful system must check human nature, not depend upon it.
The people are thinking about the money question; and if the money masters have any information which they think the people ought to have to prevent them going astray, now is the time to give it. The days are fast slipping away when the fear of credit curtailment will avail, or when wordy slogans will affright. The people are naturally conservative. They are more conservative than the financiers. ”

“ The present money system is not going to be changed by speech-making or political sensationalism or economic experiment. It is going to change under the pressure of conditions--conditions that we cannot control and pressure that we cannot control. ”

“ The ultimate check on credit is the amount of gold in the country, regardless of the amount of wealth in the country.
I am not prepared to dogmatize on the subject of money or credit. As far as money and credit are concerned, no one as yet knows enough about them to dogmatize. The whole question will have to be settled as all other questions of real importance have to be settled, and that is by cautious, well-founded experiment. ”

“ When a dollar is not always a dollar, when the 100-cent dollar becomes the 65-cent dollar, and then the 50-cent dollar, and then the 47-cent dollar, as the good old American gold and silver dollars did, what is the use of yelling about "cheap money," "depreciated money"? A dollar that stays 100 cents is as necessary as a pound that stays 16 ounces and a yard that stays 36 inches.
The bankers who do straight banking should regard themselves as naturally the first men to probe and understand our monetary system--instead of being content with the mastery of local banking-house methods ”

“ Only a comparatively few men in any organization need telephones. We formerly had a foreman for every five men; now we have a foreman for every twenty men. The other foremen are working on machines.
We cut the overhead charge from $146 a car to $93 a car, and when you realize what this means on more than four thousand cars a day you will have an idea how, not by economy, not by wage-cutting, but by the elimination of waste, it is possible to make an "impossible" price. Most important of all, we found out how to use less money in our business by speeding up the turnover. ”

“ First: that within the nation itself the tendency of financial control is toward its largest centralized banking institutions--either a government bank or a closely allied group of private financiers. There is always in every nation a definite control of credit by private or semi-public interests. Second: in the world as a whole the same centralizing tendency is operative. An American credit is under control of New York interests, as before the war world credit was controlled in London--the British pound sterling was the standard of exchange for the world's trade. ”

“ Hanging on in the hope of getting higher prices simply delayed adjustment. Nobody got the higher prices they hoped for, and if the losses had been taken all at once, not only would the productive and the buying powers of the country have become harmonized, but we should have been saved this long period of general idleness. Hanging on in the hope of higher prices merely made the losses greater, because those who hung on had to pay interest on their high-priced stocks and also lost the profits they might have made by working on a sensible basis. ”

“ Retail prices generally had not touched bottom. The public distrusted all prices. We laid our plans for another cut and we kept our production around one hundred thousand cars a month. This production was not justified by our sales but we wanted to have as much as possible of our raw material transformed into finished product before we shut down. We knew that we would have to shut down in order to take an inventory and clean house. We wanted to open with another big cut and to have cars on hand to supply the demand. Then the new cars could be built out of material bought at lower prices. ”

“ But money should always be money. A foot is always twelve inches, but when is a dollar a dollar? If ton weights changed in the coal yard, and peck measures changed in the grocery, and yard sticks were to-day 42 inches and to-morrow 33 inches (by some occult process called "exchange") the people would mighty soon remedy that. ”

“ Affairs are coming to a jam as it is, and if those who possess technical facility do not engage to remedy the case, those who lack that facility may attempt it. Nothing is more foolish than for any class to assume that progress is an attack upon it. Progress is only a call made upon it to lend its experience for the general advancement. ”

“ Therefore we should now be without the benefit of better production and loaded with a heavy debt. Our cars would probably cost about one hundred dollars more than they do; hence we should have a smaller production, for we could not have so many buyers; we should employ fewer men, and in short, should not be able to serve to the utmost. You will note that the financiers proposed to cure by lending money and not by bettering methods. ”

“ They are instinct with human destiny and they bleed. The poverty of the world is seldom caused by lack of goods but by a "money stringency." Commercial competition between nations, which leads to international rivalry and ill-will, which in their turn breed wars-- these are some of the human significations of these facts. ”

“ Banks will begin to do much more for the people than they do now, and instead of being the most expensive businesses in the world to manage, and the most highly profitable in the matter of dividends, they will become less costly, and the profits of their operation will go to the community which they serve. ”

“ It is true that if these credits were taken by American banks, those who had high-priced stocks might have gotten rid of them at a profit, but the banks would have acquired so much frozen credit that they would have more nearly resembled ice houses than banks. I suppose it is natural to hang on to the possibility of profits until the very last moment, but it is not good business.
Our own sales, after the cut, increased, but soon they began to fall off again. We were not sufficiently within the purchasing power of the country to make buying easy. ”

“ Before we had employed fifteen men per car per day. Afterward we employed nine per car per day. This did not mean that six out of fifteen men lost their jobs. They only ceased being unproductive. We made that cut by applying the rule that everything and everybody must produce or get out. ”

“ People slowed down in their buying. Our own sales kept right along, but we knew that sooner or later they would drop off. I thought seriously of cutting prices, but the costs of manufacturing everywhere were out of control. Labour gave less and less in return for high wages. The suppliers of raw material refused even to think of coming back to earth. ”

“ Cash on hand, January $20,000,000 Stock on hand turned into cash, January 1 to April 1 24,700,000 Speeding up transit of goods released 28,000,000 Collected from agents in foreign countries 3,000,000 Sale of by-products 3,700,000 Sale of Liberty Bonds 7,900,000 TOTAL $87,300,000 Now I have told about all this not in the way of an exploit, but to point out how a business may find resources within itself instead of borrowing, and also to start a little thinking as to whether the form of our money may not put a premium on borrowing and thus give far too great a place in life to the bankers. ”