He was also a terrible anti-semite.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#The_Dearborn_Inde...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of...

> Seriously, please read about how creepy Ford was, this article does not do it justice.

What surprised me the most is that Ford's decision to increase wages was actually to use Ford's dominance to pull an anti-competitive play on his rivals to try to dry them of talent and manpower, which back in the days actually was deeply tied to the throughput and quality of the product that comes out of their production lines.

Thus by paying a little extra to their workers, you in practice are killing off your competition by strangling their ability to produce competing products.

It surprised me that the author showed ignorance in a way that forced him to use some imagination to come up with absurd argumrnts when he did not needed to.

How in the world is that "anti-competitive"?

It sounds like you are saying that these workers were worth a lot of money, as they determined the quality of the cars.

So... that means that they were actually worth those higher wages.

Anti-competitive would instead be if a company did something that was unprofitable in the short term.

This wasn't unprofitable in the short term! It makes perfect business sense to pay lots of money to highly skilled workers that are legitimately worth that money!

My guess is that it requires deeper pockets but it is an utterly fucked thing to call actually competing for employeers anticompetitive. Granted the accusation "anticompetive" is often a tall poppy complaint that really means "I don't want to have to compete with that!"

In what way did the author use any more imagination than you just used?

If you have a primary source that has Ford saying "I'm increasing wages to cultivate a monopsony over labor" I would be very impressed.