Garet Garrett on the Ford Motor Company
This book is a personal favorite, a fascinating look at the founding, growth, and eventual collapse of the Ford Motor Co., by the great American journalist, Garet Garrett. His prose is fascinating enough to interest young people, so it has a particular appeal here. And the details of the union takeover of the company are heart wrenching, truly. So this book appeared in 1953, and already Garrett could see the what was in store for the company: long, slow meltdown. Here it is: The Wild Wheel.
Comments (3)
Karen De Coster
A spectacular (and very hard to find) addition to the online library.
Published: July 17, 2007 5:23 PM
eric lansing
AEN: Do you have personal favorites among the anti-statists of the 1930s?
GRANT: I'm a huge fan of Garet Garrett, a wonderful writer and thinker. He was a great pal of Bernard M. Baruch. I wrote a book about Baruch a while ago, and while reading through his papers, I found a correspondence between them. I came to be an admirer of Garet Garrett. He was so industrious and productive. He was such a student of markets and Wall Street among other things.
In 1922, he wrote a great book called The Driver. It was about a railroad titan, and it's clear to me that Ayn Rand--shall we say borrowed?--from this book for Atlas Shrugged. I discovered this when I was working on the Baruch book in the late 1970s.
Garrett also wrote a biography of Henry Ford called The Wild Wheel, among many other books. He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, and for the old Evening Post. In any case, he was a terrifically prolific and high-class journalist.
AEN: Where has the Garrettian-style attachment to principle gone?
GRANT: It's certainly not on Wall Street. What makes a successful investor is, among other things, a finely developed sense of expediency. A successful operator in the stock market is someone who gets on the right side of the primary trend and stays there. He does not object if the motive force of the primary trend is an excess creation of credit by the central bank, aided and abetted by an unprincipled Treasury.
A guy like Warren Buffet is not going to come out and say, we shouldn't buy Coca Cola at forty times earnings because we know that all these things end badly. Wall Street is intrinsically and necessarily unprincipled in the sense that it does not operate day-to-day with an eye towards what is right and what is wrong. It is the citadel of expediency.
http://mises.org/journals/aen/Aen_wi96.asp
Published: July 18, 2007 8:51 AM
Ben
Fantastic, thank you!
Published: July 18, 2007 7:36 PM