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I think you're on the right track. Ford didn't make workers more expensive to fit the price of cars. He made the cars cheaper to fit the wallets of workers. THAT is how workers could buy cars. Exactly the same thing that is going on now.

He didn't raise wages, he offered a bonus. For that bonus he owned your asp. He controlled who you associated with, what you drank, when you went to church, whether you gambled, what you said to your wife, what language you spoke at home. Even at that, the bonuses were eliminated with the depression.

Even with the bonus Americans wouldn't take the jobs. His workforce came from eastern Europe and the deep south. Hank needed workers and the blacks in the south needed work. You could have drawn a line at Mason-Dixon and said that anyone who crosses this line is ILLEGAL and still they would have come. On many lines English was a rarity. He did force his workers to take English classes.

You cannot repeal the laws of economics.

That's an excellent point. If you go back through U.S. history, you'll find that almost without exception this country thrived when its economy was being supported by large numbers of people who lived in pretty miserable conditions . . . slavery in the South in the 18th and early 19th centuries, Irish immigrants in Appalachia in the mid-1800s, Chinese "coolies" building the railroads in the 1880s and 1890s, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the early 1900s, etc.

Today is no different, except that with global trade we've managed to enjoy a high standard of living by hiding the working-class misery out of sight in places like Mexico, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.