America’s Real Business
Excerpted from My Life and Work by Samuel Crowther and Henry Ford, and Believe! 50th Anniversary Edition by Rich and Doug DeVos
While Henry Ford and Rich DeVos never crossed paths, there are parallels in their lives and thought. Both sons of Michigan believed strongly in the unlimited potential of the American people, the value of hard work, and the need to protect America’s economic freedom from government overreach and self-interested ideologues. Both spun these beliefs into enormously successful businesses that remain emblematic of our Free Enterprise system to this day.
Before founding Amway, Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel bonded over a very practical contribution of Ford’s—an old Model A that Van Andel would drive DeVos to school in for 25 cents a week. This was the beginning of their lifelong business partnership.
The essay below is excerpted from Henry Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work, and includes quotations from DeVos’s Believe! 50th Anniversary Edition, which show that despite their very different approaches to business, both Ford and DeVos benefitted from thinking deeply about the foundations of our economy, and working to uphold them in the face of political and populist challenges.
There is plenty of work to do. Business is merely work. Speculation in things already produced—that is not business. It is just more or less respectable graft. But it cannot be legislated out of existence. Laws can do very little. Law never does anything constructive. It can never be more than a policeman, and so it is a waste of time to look to our state capitals or to Washington to do that which law was not designed to do. As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.
When you get a whole country—as did ours—thinking that Washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augurs ill for the future.
Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves; our help may, however, go to Washington as a sort of central distribution point where all our efforts are coordinated for the general good. We may help the Government; the Government cannot help us. The slogan of “less government in business and more business in government” is a very good one, not mainly on account of business or government, but on account of the people. Business is not the reason why the United States was founded. The Declaration of Independence is not a business charter, nor is the Constitution of the United States a commercial schedule. The United States—its land, people, government, and business—are but methods by which the life of the people is made worthwhile. The Government is a servant and never should be anything but a servant. The moment the people become adjuncts to government, then the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural, immoral, and inhuman. We cannot live without business and we cannot live without government. Business and government are necessary as servants, like water and grain; as masters they overturn the natural order.
The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver. They can juggle the currencies as they did in Europe (and as bankers the world over do, as long as they can get the benefit of the juggling) with a patter of solemn nonsense. But it is work and work alone that can continue to deliver the goods—and that, down in his heart, is what every man knows.
Still the system is criticized. Another popular blast leveled at free enterprise is that under such a system there are too many wealthy people, too many who have too much. Once, when I was speaking on free enterprise at a college, a young man challenged me about the Cadillac I was driving at the time. “If you’re really concerned about the poor,” he said, “why don’t you give up that Cadillac you’re driving and drive an old car, one that will just get you where you need to go?” What the student inaccurately believed was that if the rich have less, the poor will have more. That is not the case.
Rich DeVos, Believe! 50th Anniversary Edition
There is little chance of an intelligent people, such as ours, ruining the fundamental processes of economic life. Most men know they cannot get something for nothing. Most men feel—even if they do not know—that money is not wealth. The ordinary theories which promise everything to everybody, and demand nothing from anybody, are promptly denied by the instincts of the ordinary man, even when he does not find reasons against them. He knows they are wrong. That is enough. The present order, always clumsy, often stupid, and in many ways imperfect, has this advantage over any other—it works. Doubtless our order will merge by degrees into another, and the new one will also work—but not so much by reason of what it is as by reason of what men will bring into it. The reason why Bolshevism did not work, and cannot work, is not economic. It does not matter whether industry is privately managed or socially controlled; it does not matter whether you call the workers’ share “wages” or “dividends”; it does not matter whether you regimentalize the people as to food, clothing, and shelter, or whether you allow them to eat, dress, and live as they like. Those are mere matters of detail. Bolshevism failed because it was both unnatural and immoral.
I explained to the young man that I provided work for lots of men buying that Cadillac. For me to be poor would not make any one of them richer. If the farmer gets less for his produce, the food doesn’t get cheaper; it gets more expensive, because the farmer, having no incentive, produces less food. If America were poorer, the poorest country in Africa would be no better off. We all would have less. The only way for there to be more material wealth in the purse of the have-nots is for there to be more goods produced, and the only way to produce more is to provide incentives for people to work harder and more efficiently. And any time those incentives are provided, there will be some people who have more than others, because some will always work a little harder, do a little more to get more for themselves.
Rich DeVos, Believe! 50th Anniversary Edition
Our system stands. Is it wrong? Of course it is wrong, at a thousand points! Is it clumsy? Of course it is clumsy. By all right and reason it ought to break down. But it does not—because it is instinct with certain economic and moral fundamentals. The economic fundamental is labour. Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. It is men’s labour that makes the harvest what it is. That is the economic fundamental: every one of us is working with material which we did not and could not create, but which was presented to us by Nature. The moral fundamental is man’s right in his labour. This is variously stated. It is sometimes called “the right of property.” It is sometimes masked in the command, “Thou shalt not steal.” It is the other man’s right in his property that makes stealing a crime. When a man has earned his bread, he has a right to that bread. If another steals it, he does more than steal bread; he invades a sacred human right. If we cannot produce we cannot have—but some say if we produce it is only for the capitalists. Capitalists who become such because they provide better means of production are of the foundation of society. They have really nothing of their own. They merely manage property for the benefit of others. Capitalists who become such through trading in money are a temporarily necessary evil. They may not be evil at all if their money goes to production. If their money goes to complicating distribution—to raising barriers between the producer and the consumer—then they are evil capitalists and they will pass away when money is better adjusted to work; and money will become better adjusted to work when it is fully realized that through work and work alone may health, wealth, and happiness inevitably be secured.
Henry Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Company, whose many innovations made the automobile America’s go-to mode of transportation.
Rich DeVos co-founded Amway and later devoted his life to philanthropy and writing. Excerpts in this piece are from his 1975 book Believe!, just re-released in an updated 50th anniversary edition with contributions from his son and fellow businessman, Doug DeVos.