by Nicholas | A friend of mine read somewhere, and passed on to me, the notion that whatever people may say, the USA is not a truly capitalist society (i.e. one where the creation of goods and services itself generates wealth) but merely a sort of predatory corporatism, where a false, inflated wealth is created simply by moving money around. As Gordon Gekko said, “I create nothing.” These days, the creation of tangible goods takes place elsewhere, and we have to import them, and pay out money to foreign companies in return. More and more companies inside the US are getting better and better at creating nothing – or so we thought. Recent events have shown that maybe they are not even good at that.
So why, then, do the people in charge still reward themselves to such an obscene level? Well, because they’re greedy, that’s why. And the belief that if the rich are happy then somehow everyone else will be happy still prevails, even, amazingly, among some people who grog along doing three jobs in order to maintain a hand to mouth existence. Here’s an interesting statistic. I read it in Vincent Bugliosi’s excellent book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.
I don’t mean to rehash here the main arguments of this book (which, incidentally, I completely agree with) but simply to bring to your attention a fact quoted in the last chapter. Now, everyone will agree that company CEOs deserve to be paid more than the people who work for them. J. P. Morgan, one of the most successful American capitalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, said that it was not unreasonable for a CEO to be paid twenty times the average salary of his employees.
That seems perfectly fair. In some countries today the average ratio is even lower: in Japan it is 10 to 1, Germany 11 to 1, and in France 16 to 1. In Britain it is higher: 25 to 1. In the USA, though, it is a staggering 531 to 1. Does anything say Greed in mile high letters more than this? Isn’t it time to understand that doing something about this sort of greed, which represents all that is bad and exploitative in an unmanaged economy, will not actually bring about the fall of the Republic, and will probably do it some good?.