Year 2000 Welsh at Gen Elect paid himself 144 mill
Sanf. wells at Citigroup 90mill
Mark at Colgate 85 mill
Gestner at IBM 102 mill
Top 10 CEOs ave 154 million increase of over 20 fold since 1980
If you argue that it is rewarding earnings ,you must realize that the earnings had to be restated on over 500 corporations. Which means they lied about profits to get greater pay. Deception has been commonplace and auditing firms have been involved in the coverups.
I can list more than a handful of others if it will prove the point.
Of course not, that’s not what I said (or at least not what I meant), I said that large accumulations of in dividual wealth were made obsolete in the capitalist system by the invention of corporations, corporations can make the large capital investments necessary for a capitalism to work. I’ve started a few businesses in my time and I know that the biggest problem in the beginning is not being able to cover the nut; running out of gas before you reach the downhill, whatever you want to call it. I realize that you can’t just go to the bank for a loan when you are a startup, but you don’t need a million dollars either.
I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I think that distributional equity is an important aspect of societal justice, you think that whatever the market says is just is in fact just. You seem to focus on what people bargained for. I am focusing on how we define social costs and how to distribute the burden of those social costs.
We can also mention tax evasioin techniques of corporations… There is over 800 Billion in Cayman Island banks. Both wealthy Americans and corporations avail themselves of this immoral and unethical tax evasion haven. Many corporations are involved in unethical practices to avoid taxes. The burdon then falls upon the rest of us.
Enron Akadelphia, Gl0bal Crossing,these are the biggest. There are lots more.
Frankly, this doesn’t bother me much. Taxing corporations is stupid anyway. They just pass the expense on to us anyway. And if there are countries out with lower corporate taxes, that just puts our companies at a competitive disadvantage.
I’m not a big fan of the corporate tax either. It complicates things and is passed through to consumers effectively imposing yet another non-progressive tax. The competitive advantage of our corporations is affected by corporate taxes only to the extent that it provides a lower rate of return to the owners of US stock than there would be if there was no corporate tax, there still has to be a profit for taxes to kick in.
Not really…unless you think you can list enough such instances to show that its either a VERY large minority of business’s who do Enron style things, or a majority. Which was the point I was getting at. There is ‘more than a handful’ of people who committ murder every year…yet even in as violent a society as we have here in the US they are pretty much a small anomolous minority.
Then I mis-underheard you and what you were saying. Sorry about that. As to whether you need a million dollars or not to startup…it varies. I certainly didn’t need (nor did I get, unfortunately 
) a million dollars to start my business…but some business’s have different needs than mine. If you are planning on manufacturing for instance, then you may need larger capital outlays than someone like me in an IT services sector.
We’ll have to agree to disagree, as you said. I’m more a rising tides float all boats kind of guy on this issue. I have no problem with taxes, or using those taxes (wisely and keeping strictly within a fixed budget) to alleviate social problems or for short term help. I just don’t want to kill or even overly hamper the golden goose.
And yes…I do focus on what people bargined for when they accepted the job they took. If said job was not acceptable, either because of the benifits or pay scale, then the person should either look elsewhere or change their skill sets and have a new focus on their target job. Certainly this isn’t always available (though I think it IS more available than people realize), and sometimes people won’t have any choice. I have no problem with direct assistance from the government in those cases…provided its short term with some expectation of eventual change to the situation.
YMMV and so does a lot of other folks in this thread. That there are these differences are what makes this board interesting. 
-XT
But here’s the reson why I don’t get too excited about the timeframe in the article cited in the OP. From today’s NYT (same paper as the OP’s link):
Emphasis added. Contrast that article to the one in the OP.
Because of my work, I have followed IBM over the years. Gerstner was worth every penny. Are you aware of IBM’s history from the late 80’s until now?
You left out the main point. Yes, the market takes care of anomalys like Enron and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. (Which I assume went out of business after the fire.) A company that poisoned people with bad meat might eventually go out of business also. The reason for inspections pre-problem is that the social cost of workers burning or meat eaters dying is considered too high. Maybe I’m misreading you, and you love OSHA. The amount of “government interference” which is best is debatable, but those most in favor of deregulation are always talking about the majority of businesses which are honest, and never want to let us consider the minority who do great harm. Not to mention how many of the majority would start cutting corners to be competitive if the regulations weren’t there.
Gerstner was good. Why don’t you concentrate on the 20 fold increase? Or the CEOs who get bonuses based on misstated earnings, but never pay them back?
J.K.Galbraith in the New Industrial State said that ceos were overrated ratifiers. When a problem occurs ,the executive has a staff that gathers up the information and presents the evidence. The ceo has the decisions clearly made by the info. Ceos do not invent the wheel. They certainly can convince some people they have arcane skills that little people can not understand.
It may be instructive to compare this activity before we had low tax rates and stock options and the level of activity after we had low tax rates and stock options. WAG, the degree, the frequency and the magnitude of the fraud is significantly higher than before we dropped taxes and introduced stock options the way we do today.
As I understand it there has benn a decrease in the wealth and earnings of the poor and middle class since this administration took office. The "rising tide lifts all boats is basically trickle down economics, not exactly widely subscribed to by economists.
I only mention this because there are two widely held beliefs that I think need to be cleared up:
The free market is only good at a few things, it is not an all purpose lens through which you can approach any significant portion of the problems we face economically or socially.
There are basically a small handful of economists at neocon think tanks that think supply sided economics work, most other economists consider it voodoo economics.
That may often be the case, but I don’t think it was for IBM. I’ve never worked for IBM, but I have for an even bigger and older company, and it is often the case where the entire management team are company veterans, fine for most cases but dangerous when the situation changes. Gerstner, coming from outside, had a very different mindset and did what was needed. He succeeded also - compare IBM today to AT&T today if you want to see what could have happened.
Agreed, some are good, some are crappy, some are lucky, etc.
Some people think that mostly anyone can be a successful CEO, I strongly disagree with that.
Compensation should match performance, to the degree that it is possible.
I’m curious to see how the posters here would view today’s society through the lens of John Rawls thought experiment.
“In his famous theory of justice, the philosopher John Rawls asks us to imagine a social contract drawn up by self-interested agents negotiating under a veil of ignorance, unaware of the talents or status they will inherit at birth–ghosts ignorant of the machines they will haunt. He argues that a just society is one that these disembodied souls would agree to be born into, knowing that they might be dealt a lousy social or genetic hand.”
So one way of looking at the Rich soaking the Poor is to say that this would be a worse gamble today than it was in the past.
I guess we can’t avoid bovine complacency, either.
The rich will always be attempting to soak the poor and the middle class, this is as sure and constant as water flowing downhill. Ideally, from the POV of the rich, society would consist of a few wealthy people like themselves so they’d have people to party with, a small class of skilled tradesmen and such who’d serve their needs ably and well in return for enough money to keep them a couple of rungs above the huge, overwhelming mass of poor people, whose lives would be so miserable that they could easily be dividing into actually starving/trying desperately not to starve – a fair description of the actual state of affairs in many Third World nations. This of course means there’s a huge pool of good-looking young people willing to prostitute themselves for what is, to the rich, pocket change. And nothing makes you feel the advantages of being rich like lots of people in abject poverty.
The only reason societies with a strong middle class exist is because SOME wealthy people – like Henry Ford – figured out that if a significant proportion of the poor had more money, they could buy more products and make the owning class even richer. If the wealthy had any long-term vision, they’d figure out that a strong middle class is their best bulwark against economic setbacks, but they don’t. All they care about is how much money they’re making right now, and how much they can make tomorrow. Day after tomorrow – piffle, let idealistic visionaries worry about that.