The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

LOOK FOR MULTIPLE PRODUCT USES
Ford predicted a biofuel industry that would, for example, convert corn 
that was otherwise useless into tractor fuel. The idea is to find multiple 
uses for every product so, if one market goes soft, the product can be sold 
in another.
The following section also includes an assessment of the dysfunctional 
role of money. Ford (1922, p. 68) elaborates on this as follows:
To make business wait on gold is like making the passenger traffic of a 
main line dependent on the facilities of a local branch with one train a day. 
If gold did the work it might be as acceptable as anything else; but it doesn’t.
Crossen (2000) expands on this by discussing how a scarcity of gold 
in eighteenth-century France impeded commerce; the entire country was 
“waiting on gold.” France had goods to trade, but shortages of a medium 
of exchange prevented the goods from selling. John Law, the architect of 
paper money, then “… proved that the value of money is an agreement 
among people, not an objective standard measurable in nuggets or ingots, 
a distinction that fostered future stages of wealth creation.”
* * *
Freeing ourselves from the petty sort of destructive competition frees us from 
many set notions. We are too closely tied to old methods and single, one-way 
uses. We need more mobility. We have been using certain things just one 
way, we have been sending certain goods through only one channel—and 
when that use is slack, or that channel is stopped, business stops, too, and 
all the sorry consequences of “depression” set in. Take corn, for example. 
There are millions upon millions of bushels of corn stored in the United States 
with no visible outlet. A certain amount of corn is used as food for man and 
beast, but not all of it. In pre-Prohibition days a certain amount of corn went 
into the making of liquor, which was not a very good use for good corn. But 

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246  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
through a long course of years corn followed those two channels, and when 
one of them stopped the stocks of corn began to pile up. It is the money fiction 
that usually retards the movement of stocks, but even if money were plentiful 
we could not possibly consume the stores of food which we sometimes possess.
If foodstuffs become too plentiful to be consumed as food, why not find 
other uses for them? Why use corn only for hogs and distilleries? Why sit 
down and bemoan the terrible disaster that has befallen the corn market? 
Is there no use for corn besides the making of pork or the making of whisky? 
Surely there must be. There should be so many uses for corn that only the 
important uses could ever be fully served; there ought always be enough 
channels open to permit corn to be used without waste.
Once upon a time the farmers burned corn as fuel—corn was plentiful and 
coal was scarce. That was a crude way to dispose of corn, but it contained the 
germ of an idea. There is fuel in corn; oil and fuel alcohol are obtainable from 
corn, and it is high time that someone was opening up this new use so that the 
stored-up corn crops may be moved.
Why have only one string to our bow? Why not two? If one breaks, there 
is the other. If the hog business slackens, why should not the farmer turn his 
corn into tractor fuel?
We need more diversity all round. The four-track system everywhere would 
not be a bad idea. We have a single-track money system. It is a mighty fine 
system for those who own it. It is a perfect system for the interest-collecting, 
credit-controlling financiers who literally own the commodity called Money 
and who literally own the machinery by which money is made and used. Let 
them keep their system if they like it. But the people are finding out that it is 
a poor system for what we call “hard times” because it ties up the line and 
stops traffic.
If there are special protections for the interests, there ought also to be spe-
cial protections for the plain people. Diversity of outlet, of use, and of finan-
cial enablement, are the strongest defenses we can have against economic 
emergencies.
It is likewise with Labour. There surely ought to be flying squadrons of 
young men who would be available for emergency conditions in harvest field, 
mine, shop, or railroad. If the fires of a hundred industries threaten to go 
out for lack of coal, and one million men are menaced by unemployment, it 
would seem both good business and good humanity for a sufficient number of 
men to volunteer for the mines and the railroads. There is always something 
to be done in this world, and only ourselves to do it. The whole world may 
be idle, and in the factory sense there may be “nothing to do.” There may be 
nothing to do in this place or that, but there is always something to do. It 
is this fact which should urge us to such an organization of ourselves that 

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What We May Expect  •  247
this “something to be done” may get done, and unemployment reduced to a 
minimum.