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Ideology Cannot Deliver Prosperity
Ideology, whether in the form of either progressive reform or reactionary
conservatism, is no substitute for conformance to the laws of physical and
behavioral science. The next paragraphs have profound implications for
21st century America, where far too many people think the “correct” ide-
ology can somehow deliver miraculous results. Shakespeare ridiculed this
idea with Jack Cade’s speech in Part 2 of King Henry VI (Act IV):
Be brave, then, for your captain is brave and vows reformation. There shall
be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped
pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small [weak]
beer. …All shall eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in
one livery that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.
Shakespeare included the coarse humor to appeal to the groundlings,
or lower-class Britons who had to stand on the ground because they could
not afford seats in the theater. Even these lower-class and quite possibly
illiterate people understood that the King, whether he was Henry VI, the
Duke of York, or the pretender Jack Cade, could not provide free food to
everybody. They also understood that price controls that demanded the
sale of seven half-penny loaves for a penny would soon make bread very
scarce. People of the early 20th century apparently had less common
sense than the groundlings because Ford (1922, p. 177) felt it necessary
to point out the obvious:
The demand of the disorderly element is practically that everybody be
requested to raise fewer potatoes, and yet that everybody be given more
potatoes. … If everybody does less work and everybody gets more of the
product of work, how long can it last?
The following material is extremely relevant today because the same
delusion, namely, that any kind of ideology as opposed to production of
value can deliver a free lunch, persists widely. This is simply the applica-
tion of the economic part of Ford’s universal code: no system can deliver
more wealth than it produces.
* * *
On the other hand, we have a different kind of reformer who never calls
himself one. He is singularly like the radical reformer. The radical has
xxxvi • Henry Ford’s Introduction
had no experience and does not want it. The other class of reformer has
had plenty of experience but it does him no good. I refer to the reaction-
ary—who will be surprised to find himself put in exactly the same class
as the Bolshevist. He wants to go back to some previous condition, not
because it was the best condition, but because he thinks he knows about
that condition.
The one crowd wants to smash up the whole world in order to make a
better one. The other holds the world as so good that it might well be let
stand as it is—and decay. The second notion arises as does the first—out
of not using the eyes to see with. It is perfectly possible to smash this world,
but it is not possible to build a new one. It is possible to prevent the world
from going forward, but it is not possible then to prevent it from going
back—from decaying. It is foolish to expect that, if everything be over-
turned, everyone will thereby get three meals a day. Or, should everything
be petrified, that thereby six per cent, interest may be paid. The trouble is
that reformers and reactionaries alike get away from the realities—from
the primary functions.
One of the counsels of caution is to be very certain that we do not mis-
take a reactionary turn for a return of common sense. We have passed
through a period of fireworks of every description, and the making of a
great many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get anywhere. It was a
convention, not a march. Lovely things were said, but when we got home
we found the furnace out. Reactionaries have frequently taken advantage
of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised “the good old
times”—which usually means the bad old abuses—and because they are
perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as “practical men.”
Their return to power is often hailed as the return of common sense.
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