Becaue gold (and silver) is the Constitutionally mandated legal tender the US dollar is supposed to be based on, and it was still true when the Model T got started.
That's the exact form of compensation, whether wages or bonus, that American wage earners had simply been working for up until that time.
There was extreme ambition for gold in particular continuously since before ancient Roman times, and few substitutes had yet been well accepted.
The degree of undue trust in politicians as beneficial economic influencers was not as strangling.
Some American workers actually often earned decent amounts of gold while others worldwide usually earned much less or none for similar effort.
> Becaue gold (and silver) is the Constitutionally mandated legal tender the US dollar is supposed to be based on.
No, it's not, and neither is anything else. The Constitution doesn't mandate any particular basis for federal legal tender; it does restrict what states can make legal tender, but gives Congress unrestricted power to coin money of any kind and set it's value (and the value of foreign money of any kind.)
You are correct, I was mistaken, it was a 1792 Act of Congress.
Not Constitutional, but going back before 1792, precious metal is still the only true currency the USA as young Ford knew it had been built upon since the beginning.
With gold and dollar still locked together having equal and excellent stability over longer terms, it was still possible to more meaningfully extrapolate relative wealth and value for labor in terms of gold & silver, and back much further in time than a single century, in some ways back millennia.
After the Fed, removal of gold coins & certificates, eventual confiscation of gold, then abandonment of the dollar's link altogether in the most recent century, not so much.
But the further you go back the less realistic units other than gold still turn out to be.
Anyway, with Ford putting out USD5 per day, the rare worker who could go 100 days without other obligations could then afford a nice Model T Ford family car for cash taking home their gross pay, which is what you needed since financing was not so common.
Seems like Ford probably is putting out close to USD300 per day now, the present worker just takes home a much smaller percentage and needs to settle for relatively less expensive cars than the _nice_ full-sized ones.
That's the exact form of compensation, whether wages or bonus, that American wage earners had simply been working for up until that time.
There was extreme ambition for gold in particular continuously since before ancient Roman times, and few substitutes had yet been well accepted.
The degree of undue trust in politicians as beneficial economic influencers was not as strangling.
Some American workers actually often earned decent amounts of gold while others worldwide usually earned much less or none for similar effort.