Burgess Owens: “I thoroughly agree with both of my colleagues. We have a moral duty, and we are charged as public officials by our…”

“I thoroughly agree with both of my colleagues. We have a moral duty, and we are charged as public officials by our Constitution to promote the general welfare. If you look at it in hard, cold terms in terms of promoting the general welfare, Henry Ford was a smart man. He might have had some problems with unions, et cetera, but he came to the reality that if he is going to sell his cars in large amounts, he has got to pay his workers enough wages to buy his cars, and that is just plain old American common sense. We have serious problems in our economy right now with consumer spending. The retail establishments are suffering. Why they are suffering is because the people on the bottom, from the bottom up, are the ones who spend the money in the stores because they need immediate necessities. They need food, clothing, shelter, they need refrigerators, they need the kinds of things that you buy from our stores. The people at the very top who are drawing large amounts of profits from Wall Street, they are the rich and the famous who pick up and travel around the world, and spend their money all over the world and buy real estate all over the world, buy diamonds, jewels, and certain kinds of things that do not feed back into the economy. They do not turn the money over. The great locomotive of the free world economy has been the American consumer. We are about to destroy the American consumer and end the great economy that has fed the free world for all these many years.”