pompous_fox
April 23
Thanks Mike – have to keep it under a pseudonym when posting online, as the “progressive” political culture here is as about as tolerant of Libertarian views, as Puritans were tolerant of witchcraft…
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In Reply To
dennz
April 23
Pompous Fox……I don’t know you but you are absolutely right. Mike ··· (click for more details)
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dennz
April 23
Pompous Fox……I don’t know you but you are absolutely right.
Mike
··· (click for more details)
pompous_fox
April 23
Bit late to this party, and the interview has already been done: I agree that this punitive tax on companies is more naked theft – masquerading as a crusade for “equality” – from the progressive shysters running SF into the ground.
CEO compensation is complicated, often tied to stock options etc. rather than “bags of money”, and if companies are riding a Fed-induced boom, with their share price artificially inflated, then CEO pay is going to rise, all else being equal.
CEO pay is also usually performance-based: so if shareholders/board think a CEO is worth their compensation, then that is their damned business, regardless of how much they pay their janitors.
This tax is, again, the manifestation of the politics of envy, and isn’t going to do a damn thing to help the average worker in any of these companies.
Pompous Fox
jeff
April 22
“Regular” people have an easier time understanding how movie stars and all star athletes can earn so much more than the other employees. If you loose all of your word class talent, you’re left with a B movie or a minor league team, two things that don’t attract interest from around the word.
In some cases, being a CEO might be pretty straightforward. In many other cases, it is a tremendously hard job with a lot of risk. You have to worry about government compliance (in many cases, while forging ahead in unchartered territory, which comes with potentially civil or criminal liability. See Ripple, Coinbase, and Uber, for examples.) You have to worry about your 1000’s of employees. And you have to worry about your investors, both board members and the potentially millions of people that hold your stock.
Furthermore, CEOs are also like all star celebrity athletes! Some super stars (e.g., Zuckerberg, Bill Gates) even took the risk to drop out of school to play with the professionals, and still outperformed all the pros. People like Elon Musk are effective at taking crazy ideas and turning them into successful businesses, in order to challenge the world’s car industry, transportation industry, and space flight industry. If you don’t like these characters, imagine if companies and countries from around the world bid on getting Einstein to tell them what and how to build something. The one that bids 2x the cost of a regular employee won’t win.
A third party should not have the authority to break up a relationship between consenting adults, and that applies to employment relationships as well as romantic relationships. How much to pay an employee is up to the owners of the company and the employee in question. It’s typically set by the market, that is, the demand for that employee. Ultimately, if high pay for an executive ultimately results in customers buying the product or service - when they otherwise would not have - then it’s justified. If people don’t like existence of companies that give high executive pay, then the best way to express their opinion and create change is to stop buying their products. It may be hard, in part because these superstars did such a great job!
An easier way would be to simply punish companies - taking their money coercively - for giving high executive pay. We view this as theft. Alternatively, owners usually choose how much to pay employees. If the government usurps this authority over all companies, then it is seizing control, in part, of each company, in order to make managerial decisions. This is also towards socialism, which (is another instance of theft and) is very inefficient. Having SF voters and politicians in charge of employee pay at private companies is absurd. Remember when SF recently paid the janitor that slept in the closet $270k per year?
Anyway, one of the things that makes SF successful is our talented people and our world renowned companies. SF currently enjoys a budget larger than most countries. But, we’re already losing companies to freer places that are more welcoming to the companies and people that are building the future.
If you feel that reality deviates from “free market” painted above, it’s likely the result of government interference. For example, government patents create barriers preventing “Pear” - a computer company that pays executives less - from freely competing with Apple. Also, stock holders supporting high executive pay could simply demand executive pay be lowered, but they apparently don’t want to, for some reason.
dennz
April 22
It is so easy to move out of this town….and people are doing it left and right. Why would you want to give more people more reasons to leave? So silly. (typical San Francisco). And so easy to avoid. Take income in some form other than salary. Take income in another jurisdiction. The list is endless.
Besides, the idea is based on socialistic labor theory. Labor is only needed if there is capital, management and a customer for what is being produced. Not to belittle labor/employees. But it isn’t the job of government to intervene in those decisions. It is the job of the market. In the end, the customer decides employee wages.
Mike
··· (click for more details)
Starchild
April 22
I got an interview request today from a reporter with the site WhoWhatWhy.org (new one to me!). He’s writing about Proposition L, the tax on companies that pay their highest-paid executives more than 100 times more than their median employee earns, which was on last November’s SF ballot and passed with 65% of the vote.
He said he’d have questions about the economic impact and political impact of the measure, and why we don’t think it’s good public policy, and I’m scheduled to talk with him tomorrow afternoon. I have some ideas on what to say, but more input is welcome. Let me know if you can think of any particular good points to be made from a libertarian perspective on the issue.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
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