Ed Wallace:

Henry Ford would have none of it. He wasn’t about to pay royalties on someone’s made-up patent, nor was he in the mood to limit his potential for production. Even in the earliest days he knew that mass production would be the key to driving down the prices of his cars and thereby making them truly affordable to all.



A lawsuit brought by the ALAM to force Ford out of business, or make him liable for millions of dollars in royalties, went on for years. In late 1909, just as the Model T was starting to sweep the nation, Judge Charles Hough of the Circuit of the Southern District of New York ruled against Ford. Ford was so dejected, he came close to selling his company to General Motors. Instead, he regrouped, posted a $350,000 bond and appealed the case.



In 1911, for the final trial, Ford built an automobile from Selden’s patent application and proved without a shadow of a doubt that it would not run. Moreover, as Ford pointed out, every manufacturer was using Otto’s version of an internal combustion engine, not Brayton’s. This time Ford won, and the auto industry in America became part of a true free enterprise system.

From there came the moving assembly line. Then Ford determined that, if America was going to build for consumers, then people needed to make more money to buy things. There were other business reasons, but he did double wages for his workforce; and the American Century started in earnest.

Chrystia Freeland:

The big economic question in much of the world today is usually framed as the fight between advocates of austerity and advocates of growth. But another way to view the debate is as a contest between those who think that 21st-century government can be effective and those who don’t.

Indeed, some of America’s most outspoken capitalists have begun to fight the “Buffett Rule,” which would set a minimum tax level for millionaires, and other calls to raise taxes for those at the very top, with the argument that money is best left in the bank accounts of the superrich because they are more effective at using it than the state is.



“I’m a job creator. I’m one of the guys who can help us out. I’m a Silicon Valley guy who can invent and create,” T.J. Rodgers, chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, told me. “If you tax me more, I will either give less to charity or I will fund venture companies less, or I will sell the stock in my own company or other companies I own, like Intel and Google. I will do one of those three things to return the money to the government.”