There is a long history of conservatives inveighing against lazy lay-abouts. In the Bible sloth was one of the seven deadly sins. Amos complained of the rich committing lechery on ivory beds. In the 17th century authors such as Isaac Watts said that Satan finds mischief still, for idle hands to do. And American conservatives still revel in the Reagan trope of welfare queens and baby machines.
The problem, as conservatives seem to see it, with welfare benefits, unemployment and the social safety net is that they allow people to become lazy. If we don't have to be responsible for ourselves and rise or fall on own own initiative, people will naturally slough off. They will sit around doing nothing, leaching off the rest of us, simply pretend to be busy, or make half-hearted attempts to find work while wasting most of their time watching television or some such.
She said they've tried all manner of incentives for CEOs to tie compensation to performance: huge pay packages, golden parachutes, stock options. And none of them have worked. She compared stock options to someone giving her five millions dollars, promising her another five million dollars in 10 years if she stopped eating chocolate.
Sure, there would be some incentive to abstain. But not a whole lot. You've got five million dollars!
That's the situation we have with CEOs. Most of them make so much money -- many in a single year and some even in a few days -- that they would be able to live out their entire lives never having to work another day. A single year's salary is enough to make them independently wealthy of the corporation, no matter how bad a job they do. (Democrats wanted some bonus claw-backs, but Republicans successfully beat that off.) In short, highly paid CEOs don't have any skin in the game any more.
These CEOS are far cozier than any welfare queen. No matter what mistake they make, they've already come out on top. Even if they break laws, they are usually able to cover everything up and buy their way out of it (like Rupert Murdoch and his various companies).
This self-satisfied complacency is the worst enemy of a good leader. Yet many turn themselves into pampered queens, with servants, maids and gardeners ready at their beck and call, private jets, million-dollar corporate apartments and gold toilet seats.
If you believe in welfare queens, then you have to believe in corporate queens: the logic is inescapable. The same human frailties and dynamics are at work for the welfare queen as the corporate queen. It's more insidious, though. The corporate queens have the appearance of respectability; everyone is fawning over them, constantly telling them how smart and fabulous they are, while everyone looks down on the lowly welfare queen. Welfare queens actually have an incentive to get off their duffs and do something to regain the respect of their fellows, and ultimately their benefits end (courtesy of Clinton era welfare reform).
Corporate queens enjoy the envy of others, who all lust for the same easy life. They gain coteries of sycophants who echo what the queens want to hear. Real criticism is silenced; only fools contradict the man in charge. Anyone who's worked at a big company knows what I'm talking about. The VPs who regularly sneak out for one o'clock tee times. The CEOs who take three-hour liquid lunches. The sales guys lounging in luxurious corporate boxes at Knicks games. The execs who always manage to book business trips to Florida and Hawaii in the winter. These guys don't actually do any real work, after all. It's not like anyone is going to miss them.
Corporate governance has been abysmal in recent years. Boards have tried everything to get some kind of responsibility out of their execs, except one thing: paying them less. If a CEO actually depended on the company for his future income, odds are he would do a better job. But if you give him enough money in a single year to make him independently wealthy, what hold do you have on him? He doesn't need your job, and he knows a hundred other companies would snap him up in an instant. Even when CEOs do screw up, the disaster is usually covered up because it will reflect poorly on the company. These guys are rarely called to account, and go on to wreak havoc over and over.
CEO compensation relative to average worker salaries has gone through the roof in the last 40 years. But CEO performance is certainly no better, and is probably much worse. That's a lot of money that companies could use to make better products, make their products more competitive (reducing prices to consumers), or at least return to the shareholders.
If we can scream bloody murder about overpaid Wisconsin teachers who make all of $50,000 a year, can't we take a little umbrage at the guys caused the financial meltdown, or filled the Gulf of Mexico with oil, and are still pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year?
4 comments:
There is a long history of conservatives inveighing against lazy lay-abouts.
Voices in my head,
all I listen to,
are voices in my head,
so I ignore you.
Oh, juris, would you please stop? You know they say it all the time. And let's skip the part where you say "show me one example," I show you several, and then you play games.
Here's to hoping the concept of "Corporate Queens" catches on. This is the reason why I started this blog...so concepts like this could be created and disseminated.
It's really nobody's business to be worrying very much about how much a private employee gets paid. If you don't like the way a company does business, don't do business with that company. Conflating the very separate issue of how much a public employee makes with that of private employees is a stupidity commonly found here, though. Public employees work for us and their pay/benefits are legitimately our business. A private employee's wages/benefits are not, unless you are their employer. And before you start, being a customer of theirs doesn't make you an employer, though I've seen that category error practiced here before, too.
You know they say it all the time.
Who says it all the time M? Even the anons here don't, let alone anyone else who posts from the non-liberal cave. You want to whip yourself into a frenzy over Michelle Bachmann, go ahead and pound your pud til you are blue in the face. You have far more interest in her than I or any other non-liberal here has.
Why aren't you interested in engaging with people who are actually here? You are just like a Baptist preacher, railing against Satan - not that you ever get close to him, but you have a never ending fascination. You ignore real people in favor of obsessing about phantoms. Is that all you are interested in M? If so, perhaps I should move on, as there just won't ever be an interesting dialogue here.
I miss blk, because even though we rarely agreed, he actually read what I wrote, understood it and knew that I just wasn't an other. Seeing some of that from you or N would be more than refreshing - it might just stun me.
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