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Herbert W. Armstrong Post Office Box 431, Tucson, Arizona 85702
April 28, 1980
Dear Co-Workers and Brethren in Christ:
Recently I wrote in The PLAIN TRUTH that we should prepare
to adjust to a lower standard of living.
I mentioned that the United States standard of living is much
higher than in Britain, most European countries, Japan. I explained
how this was largely due to U.S. manufacturers. In 1914, I wrote
a magazine article on the Ford Motor Company $5-per-day wage scale.
Ford had just inaugurated the assembly-line, conveyor-belt
system of mass-machine production. This was possible because they
had a mass market. I went to Detroit in early January 1914 and saw
Henry Ford and his Sociological Department manager, John R. Lee.
It was BIG NEWS at the time.
This cut Ford production cost per car to a very great extent.
But soon other car manufacturers adopted the same process. Labor
union officials saw that this meant materially larger profits per
car for the factory. So, as manufacturers in other lines came to
the same mass-machine production system, a wave of violent labor
union strikes ensued. Labor was not going to allow capital and
management to keep all of the big profits. There was the Herrin,
Illinois coal strike massacre, the Los Angeles Times bombing in
a labor war.
Result? U.S. labor soon rose to a standard three times that
of British labor and four times that of post-war Japan. The
American living standard became the highest in the world.
But the Common Market in Europe provided European manufacturers
with a mass market for the same assembly-line mass-production--AND
AT LOW-COST LABOR! To this day the average European living standard
is considerably lower than the American, though Sweden, Switzerland
and one or two others have rivaled us.
But German and Japanese automobiles are driving U.S. car
manufacturers crazy. In spite of high U.S. tariffs, they
under-sell U.S. motorcar companies. The same is true in many
other lines, such as cameras, watches, electronics, TV sets, etc.
But now, the United States has entered a period of economic
depression. A significant number of large factories have laid
off workmen. The prime interest rate had soared to 20% for major
borrowers. The experts and observers see nothing but trouble ahead.
This brings us to a serious dilemma for readers of The PLAIN
TRUTH and members of the Worldwide Church of God.
The Almighty God offers one real economic protection to our
people--and it is just the opposite to what many might suppose.