Originally posted by: shrumpage
Some of us believe it is worth while to give up security so we have the freedom to make choices, even bad ones.
You can't, IMO, discuss that so generally, you need to look at the specific policy.
You have not kept this topic very focused, you kept shifting it way from government limitation on CEO pay, to a broader issue of wealth concentration.
If you keep it in the simple issue of the context of the thread topic: government should NOT dictate the upper limit of how much a person should make. Its an issue of freedom, its an issue of choice.
You can claim the issue of the serving the 'greater good' by applying your own morality to a situation, but that is part of the problem. It is your morality, where you draw the line.
Most spending of money is wasteful to some degree, i just who is viewing the spending.
One issue that i've raised directly to you, three times now, is what happens to the money that is, in your view, wrongfully paid. Or the a benefit wrongfully granted.
The money doesn't just sit in a mattress, doing nothing, it is at a minimum circling in the economy. The luxury jet you view as a waste was built by someone, is being piloted by someone and is being maintained by someone. All who are being paid. That purchase has put money is another companies pocket.
Basically the money goes somewhere else, being paid to other people - just not the people you think it should be.
Your lack of understanding the paradigms of the issues with the concentration of wealth is an issue here, as lacking them you wrongly conclude that it doesn't matter much where the wealth goes. Hey it's all in the hands of people, and people are all created equal, so who cares whose hands?
I think it matters a lot to the quality of life of people in the society, matters a lot to the functioning of the democracy, where the wealth goes.
But put aside the issue of concentration of wealth to more speficially discuss the CEO compensation.
I'm reluctant to interfere; I'd prefer the 'free market' could 'self regulate' too, and I recognize that the dangers in taking action justify some tolerance for some errors.
But the harms caused are significant. Indeed, the whole - I get to use the word again in the same post - paradigm that corporations are required to serve society's interests to some extent, and can be regulated to do so - is turned on its head as they gain power and simply have the 'right' to do what they want with only a very narrow range for regulation. You are there to serve the corporation, not the other way around.
'Serving the public' doesn't mean a non-profit; it means not being excessively a leech, harming people, corrupting our political system for its own massive profit extraction.
For example, when US corporations operating in Chile sold products to US consumers, that was fine. When they got the president to replace democracy with Pinochet, that was not.
But back to CEO compensation. You say you want an answer to where the wealth goes - here it is: it goes primarily to increase the ownership of the CEO of the nation's resources.
This is the difference between one person owning 50 companies and 50 people owning 50 companies; the difference between the owner having a million times the wealth of his impoverished employees and his having 100 times the wealth of his prosperous employees; between productivity being high with a lot of incentives, and low with the incentive money used to increase one person's wealth.
It's not that you don't have a point about the money 'remaining in society', you do, but you're wrongheaded about it. It's also about who controls how much. Where does the wealth go? When you see wealth more concentrated, you see the toys of the wealthy go up in value. The companies they want to own cost more (further out of the reach of the average people to own much of them). The real estate they want to own costs more (out of the reach of the others who would like to own more of it. Finite resources become less available to more people. You might see theprivate jet industry 'take off' (no pun intended), with more resources dedicated to the wealthy flying there, while the commercial air industry falters, with fewer able to buy tickets, fewer flights to fewer locations people can less afford.
It's easy to say why some high compensation by CEO's is justified - but there are lines where it becomes counter-productive. It's not rocket science to look at how a lot of the compensation is from corrupting the system, not from any justified activity for the amounts involved.
As I've said, I'm not too interested in the government picking a number for CEO pay.
My first preference is to directly fix the 'holes' in the system allowing for the corruption of the normal process where companies base compensation on legitimate measures.
Just as we needed laws against 'insider trading' to protect from one type of corruption, we need laws to restrict the corruption of the compensation process.
My reasons for wanting higher taxation on the highest incomes are really for other reasons, so I won't go much into that here. But failing to 'fix the system', it could help.
Anyway, given your argument that it doesn't really matter whose hands the money is in, I have a request for you about your salary's destination. Just call me 'CEO234'.
No problem, right? The money will still be in the economy, I promise. Oh, so who gets the money does matter to you after all, when it's your money.
You attack my taking a position on my prsonal values, which I think is crazy. But those values basically say, I think a CEO who has a mansion while his employees have homes is better than a CEO who owns ten mansions and a masive area of land with shanties in which his employees live. I'm not saying he should live in the same type of home as his employees. And I'm saying I'd rather see him own a company and 10 other people own 10 others, than to see him own all 11 and inevitably reduce other's prosperity as a result.
It comes down, I guess, to the Achilles' Heel of capitalism - monopoly. Capitalism only works with a distributed playing field, with competition - when one owns all, it fails society.
The secret to capitalism is to turn the system so that people get more for productivyt, but not so much more as to reach the point of monopoly/oligarchy/etc. to where their simply having so much guarantees them wealth, resulting in the power they obtain being used to block competition rather than to better serve society with competitive products and services.
Imagine, for example, there was only one HMO, for profit; or only one car manufacturer, for profit, if you need help with the probolem with the monopolistic side of capitalism.
This is quite a rambling post, so I'll give a Cliffs, that the issues with CEO compensation involve the harms caused both in terms of concentrated wealth and reduced productivity as the money that could go to productive use (new investment, incentives, etc) goes to add to the amount of resources owned by the CEO, and the process by which compensation is determined having been so corrupted not to follow the market.
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