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UNION POLITICS
This story is about a labor leader I once met whom I did understood. This fellow was named Herr Eichhorn and he’d become dictator in a town in Germany named Dusseldorf.
There’d been an uprising and the Bolsheviks captured the town. Eichhorn had been a street car conductor and now he found himself in the Burgomeister’s Palace as a dictator of whatever province Dusseldorf was in. He was running the works.
I met him at the palace to talk. He was a very fine street car conductor who sat there beaming and happy at his desk. I asked him what he’d done since he’d become a dictator.
“Well the first thing O did is two days after I was dictator, I doubled the salaries of all the street car employees,” he said.
“That’s fine, what else did you do?”
“I doubled the salaries of all the street cleaners. In fact I’ve doubled all the salaries in Dusseldorf.”
“Where do you get all the money to pay all these double wages?” I asked.
He said, “I get it out of the treasury of Dusseldorf.”
So I thought for a moment and I asked him, “What’ll happen when you run out of the money in the Treasury of Dusseldorf? How are you going to pay these double wages?”
He grinned. “I’m not worried about that, by the time that happens I won’t be dictator.”
(The Ben Hecht Show Dec 4, 1958)