On October 1, 1908, Henry Ford put the Model T on sale for $850, and told everyone he was going to keep making it cheaper.
The other carmakers thought that was funny.
Cars were rich people's toys back then. They were built one at a time, and by hand.
But Ford envisioned something else. He wanted a car a farmer could buy, and he figured the best way to do that was to stop building them one at a time. Instead, he broke the work down into small steps and ran the construction past the workers on a moving line, where each man did one job over and over.
The result: Building a single Model T went from taking more than twelve hours to build to taking about ninety minutes.
That made the car less expensive to make, and as the car got cheaper to make, he made it cheaper to buy. Just like he’d promised, the $850 car dropped to $490, and then again to around $290.
He sold fifteen million of them.
Who was laughing now?
At his peak, he was worth what would be about $200 billion today.
It’s popular to hate rich people.
You see it in protests on street corners, and in any comment section of anyone who has amassed great personal wealth. This feeling is all rooted in the same misunderstood idea about money.
Henry Ford didn't take a bigger slice of the pie for himself, thus robbing others of a piece.
He made the pie enormous.
A farmer who'd never dreamed of owning a car owned one. So did the men on his assembly line—they could afford what they built! Nobody got poorer because Ford got richer. That's not how value-creation works! But most people still don’t understand. They think there's a fixed amount of it and the only thing to be decided is who grabbed too much.
But the history of human progress and invention proves that wrong.
Kids don't get taught this. Sure, they might hear about greedy industrialists, but they’re not going to learn about the man who put a middle-class life within reach of millions of families by relentlessly lowering the price of his goods. The real story of how ordinary people got richer over the last century isn’t one of stuff being stolen, or stuff being redistributed. It's about innovators and problem-solvers figuring out how to do more, and everybody rising as a result.
That's a lesson that we try to teach in our America's History books and curriculum. Not the villains-and-victims, dates-and-names snoozefest that made you hate history in ninth grade, but the real account of how this country's ideas about work and freedom and enterprise produced more prosperity for regular people than anywhere in human history.
Living a life of victimhood and envy isn’t what any of us want for our kids (what a miserable way to view the world!) yet that’s exactly what schools, pop culture, and media teach them. If we’re going to give them hope about the future and their place in it, we’re going to have to teach them to think differently than other people.
The resources we’ve created do exactly that. They give parents, grandparents, and concerned teachers the tools they need to help form a generation that will prosper and thrive. Human flourishing can never come from envy, entitlement, and bitterness, but the principles of entrepreneurial thinking, value creation, and self-reliance are going to have to be carefully and purposely taught.
And it’s people like you who are going to do the hands-on work. We’re just here to support you.
Oh, and Happy 118th birthday to the Tin Lizzie.
(Not bad for an idea the “experts” laughed at)
— Connor
