Capitalism begets capitalism. The system is self-optimizing for greatest profitability. In public companies, the board and CEO are beholden to the shareholders. It's their job to make the investment worthwhile. The CEO won't take the job if they don't have a good chance of coming out a winner. If the board hires a CEO who's willing to work for peanuts the shareholders will kill the board. The system automatically selects for high paid ceos that work in the interest on the shareholders.
To suggest otherwise is to fiddle with the basic capitalism our entire financial system is based on, and trying to artificially force capitalism to work against itself is shortsighted at best. There are examples all over the place of countries who pretend to implement capitalism, but instead monkey with the market.
Quite frankly, if you want a financial revolution, it has to start the same way any other successful revolution starts - you get the bottom part of the populace to boycott those companies that aren't doing what they want them to do. It won't work unless you get a significant (double digit percentage) portion of the population to decide that it's in their best interest to boycott companies where the CEO makes "too much".
You can't force this from the top - there are a million loopholes, and the act of closing them merely opens new loopholes.
Most people have chosen to accept the system and work within its framework. Makes it hard to start a revolution when most people are happy with what they have, and even the lower middles class are still in the top 20% of living conditions considering the entire world.
What other options are there? Is there really a way we can force executives to accept less pay for higher standards of success without fundamentally undermining our economy? Even if we do that, is that actually going to increase our society's wellbeing? How can we make sure that money actually goes someplace useful - it belongs to the company if they don't give it to the wealthy. We can't extract it through taxes because there's always a dozen loopholes.
Then there's people like me who alternately are apathetic (it's just the way it is, deal) and accepting (hey, if I work hard, I can make myself wealthy). Is there a chance of reaching us who either don't care, or don't really want it changed because it's going to be us someday, and we believe that if we've invented the next awesome gizmo, then we shouldn't be limited to earning only a million dollars because no one should be rich.
Somehow limiting the amount of wealth any given individual can accumulate will devastate the growth of startups. They are started on the basis that if successful they will vault the inventor/owner/investors into multimillionaires. We would not have Google if the cofounders did not believe that they had a chance at becoming filthy rich. They would not have attracted investors if the investors did not believe they could get a 100x return on their investment. Forcing any sort of cap on either CEOs, executives, investors, or companies, (which is the same as taxing them at an increasing rate) will kill innovation.
To suggest otherwise is to fiddle with the basic capitalism our entire financial system is based on, and trying to artificially force capitalism to work against itself is shortsighted at best. There are examples all over the place of countries who pretend to implement capitalism, but instead monkey with the market.
Quite frankly, if you want a financial revolution, it has to start the same way any other successful revolution starts - you get the bottom part of the populace to boycott those companies that aren't doing what they want them to do. It won't work unless you get a significant (double digit percentage) portion of the population to decide that it's in their best interest to boycott companies where the CEO makes "too much".
You can't force this from the top - there are a million loopholes, and the act of closing them merely opens new loopholes.
Most people have chosen to accept the system and work within its framework. Makes it hard to start a revolution when most people are happy with what they have, and even the lower middles class are still in the top 20% of living conditions considering the entire world.
What other options are there? Is there really a way we can force executives to accept less pay for higher standards of success without fundamentally undermining our economy? Even if we do that, is that actually going to increase our society's wellbeing? How can we make sure that money actually goes someplace useful - it belongs to the company if they don't give it to the wealthy. We can't extract it through taxes because there's always a dozen loopholes.
Then there's people like me who alternately are apathetic (it's just the way it is, deal) and accepting (hey, if I work hard, I can make myself wealthy). Is there a chance of reaching us who either don't care, or don't really want it changed because it's going to be us someday, and we believe that if we've invented the next awesome gizmo, then we shouldn't be limited to earning only a million dollars because no one should be rich.
Somehow limiting the amount of wealth any given individual can accumulate will devastate the growth of startups. They are started on the basis that if successful they will vault the inventor/owner/investors into multimillionaires. We would not have Google if the cofounders did not believe that they had a chance at becoming filthy rich. They would not have attracted investors if the investors did not believe they could get a 100x return on their investment. Forcing any sort of cap on either CEOs, executives, investors, or companies, (which is the same as taxing them at an increasing rate) will kill innovation.
