"Business is business. The objective of industry is to make money. We are determined to make money. We concentrate solely on that aim. If we are satisfied that a billion-dollar merger will mean greater profits, we go ahead and engineer it.

"One of the easiest ways to cut down expenses being to cut down salary and wage rolls, we of course lay men off right and left. If elderly workers have become less nimble because of their long years of service, they are the logical ones to be dropped first."

But the telling part of the editorial comes later: "How to take care of unemployment is a problem for others to solve. Let George do that. Politicians talk as if they know how to solve the problem. Very well, let them go ahead and do it. Anyway, we haven't the time to bother with it. It isn't our worry."

Reich implies that much hasn't changed in the 80 or so years since. He lists three reasons why he believes this is so. First, high unemployment keeps wages down. Workers who worry about losing their jobs settle for anything they can get, which is why, he argues, hourly earnings have been dropping these past several years.