Last night, I read Charles G. Koch’s Good Profit. His values really reminded me of Henry Ford’s.* I first heard Koch in an interview my boss was watching, and he made a lot of sense. He divided profits into good and bad, or, equivalently, economic and political. In a very conversational way, he explains what you’ve read a thousand times but elected representatives still don’t understand – that economies consist in improving available items for trade. People who choose to survive without contributing to the improvement of the overall standard of living (by suing, shuffling senseless paperwork, or mooching up for grants), strange to say, apply drag to society’s quality of life. When engaged conscientiously, productivity, trade, and capitalism are virtues.
Meanwhile, over in Mills River, members of town council gleefully authorized the offering of $302,926 in economic development incentives to GF Linamar. Pull some numbers out of your hat for multipliers. Said Andrew Tate, president of the Henderson County Partnership for Economic Development:
Historically what we’ve seen is companies exceeding these (projections), sometimes significantly.
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*I regret I feel I have to play this game, but Koch wrote nothing about anti-Semitism. Henry Ford was a great industrialist with great ideas. But just like Thomas Jefferson, a man of many great ideas, the PC police had to find a personality flaw. Opinion shapers like to tell us that once a person has one bad idea, all their other thoughts must be dismissed. These are the same people that tell me being a woman automatically translates into selecting a woman on a ballot. I don’t get it, and they don’t either. My point is, Ford’s My Life and Work would provide better training for running a business than any of the various MBA fads I recall working under through the years.
