Henry Ford might have paid his workers a good salary, but he was
also a notorious anti-semite and supporter of the Nazis, from
whom he accepted the Grand Cross of the Golden Eagle in 1938,
Germany’s highest honor for foreigners. The juxtaposition is
more than coincidence. Henry Ford's approach to corporate
management, a paternalistic and micromanaging approach that
traded liberty for generous and wholistic compensation for
workers, was a natural outgrowth of the economic ideas behind
the Prussian state which was one of the main components of what
would become a unified German state in the late 19th century. To
some extent, the whole neo-feudal American economy in which the
social safety net for families comes mostly from their employers
rather than from the state, can be traced to these ideas. Many
of the literal and intellectual heirs of those Prussians went on
to become Nazis in the wake of the economic privations that the
Treaty of Versailles, the ended World War I, exacerbated in
Germany. The collapse of