The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

PROSPERITY SHOULD BE WITHIN EVERYBODY’S REACH
The following material again contradicts the paradigm of business as a 
zero-sum game, in which one supply chain participant’s gain can come 
only at the expense of another’s loss. Ford contended, and proved unequiv-
ocally, that a business whose focus is on service to its stakeholders can cre-
ate abundant wealth for all participants.
* * *
If we all created wealth up to the limits, the easy limits, of our creative capac-
ity, then it would simply be a case of there being enough for everybody, and 
everybody getting enough. Any real scarcity of the necessaries of life in the 
world—not a fictitious scarcity caused by the lack of clinking metallic disks 
in one’s purse—is due only to lack of production. And lack of production is 
due only too often to lack of knowledge of how and what to produce.
This much we must believe as a starting point: That the earth produces, or 
is capable of producing, enough to give decent sustenance to everyone—not 
of food alone, but of everything else we need. For everything is produced from 
the earth.
That it is possible for labour, production, distribution, and reward to be so 
organized as to make certain that those who contribute shall receive shares 
determined by an exact justice.
That regardless of the frailties of human nature, our economic system 
can be so adjusted that selfishness, although perhaps not abolished, can be 
robbed of power to work serious economic injustice.