The thought smacked me straight in the forehead this morning.
There are some people who have the self-confidence and self-sufficiency to choose their path in life to win the respect of others. Or, in other words, their lives are built around core principles which illuminate their choices and prove to others the validity of their lives.
We all know people like that. People who aren’t often drawn into disagreements, but rather are the sort of folks we seek out to settle those fights. The people who can through logic and wisdom point out the facts we’ve overlooked or the wrong decisions that were made to bring the situation to a boiling point – and they can diffuse the problems.
Then we know the other sort. The person you don’t tend to leave a half-consumed beverage, or half-eaten piece of cake, or five bucks on the table. It’ll be gone when you get back, and they never saw who did it. Those who practice this behavior often remember to wipe their lips, pop a breath mint, or hide the money in their shoe, so when they’re searched, they haven’t got it.
But the realization was that the second sort of people inevitably are operating from a position of weakness. And those folks are the folks you can easily identify. They sometimes find themselves at an advantage, and when they do, things do not go well. They loot the candy jar, empty the fridge, clean out the wallets and bank accounts, and somehow it’s not their fault.
And so, when I looked at the news this morning, I realized that the people currently in power really aren’t the powerful people. They’re the small individuals who managed to somehow convince others that they could be their champion. Thing is, what is almost always overlooked is that when a weak person is put in a position to manage resources or systems, they seek first to hoard the spoils so they can have something when the inevitable fall comes.
And that’s how it’s pretty easy to identify the weak and the strong. A truly strong person reaches out to those who are or feel weak and offers them some comfort, assistance, and validation. The strong look to build up the weak because they know how terrible it can be when you are someone who lives in fear of losing that which you’ve tried so hard to accumulate.
And there’s the real problem. When the game is stacked against you it’s pretty damned hard to even play, let alone compete. And if you look around today, our economy is rapidly developing not gaps but canyons. There are some few folks who have accumulated a terrible amount of money. And because of the system we have now, they are not carrying their full share of the load to support our government, and our society. Honestly, when you look at someone like Elon Musk, who is, it is said, in line for his fourth billion-dollar payday this year, I have to ask if there’s really anyone on the planet worth even ten percent of that total PER YEAR, let alone forty times that in one year.
I’ve long made the case that in this country, it is well past time we need wage controls. I would very simply link them to a pay ratio. And let’s be fair. We’ll say that a CEO’s annual total compensation – that is benefits, salary, bonuses, options, and etc – all of it – should be tied to the pay rate of their lowest-paid employee. And yes, I do feel we’ll probably need to indicate that “employee” would be anyone who worked in any way, shape, or form, for the organization. If you are the CEO of ACME INDUSTRIES, your entire staff includes the contractors and others. So if someone works for your firm in excess of 32 hours per week on average, for at least nine months of the year, including their paid vacation time, they are considered a full-time employee. And so if you’re the CEO, your total compensation should be limited to 100 times that of your lowest-paid employee.
Why is that fair? Well, lets say your company has a wonderfully profitable, fantastic year, and you believe you’ve earned a million-dollar bonus. Ok, all right, that means that your lowest paid employees will also receive a $10,000 bonus – and obviously, the rest of your rank and file should receive bonuses that would also reflect their contribution – and thus be probably larger than the bottom of the ladder, but hey, it’s your company.
What good would that do? It would first off spread the wealth around a little bit more – because Gordon Gecko, that fictional figure who was meant to be a cautionary tale and the bad example, sure as hell isn’t the American Dream.
Because there’s the other side of the whole thing. If you keep accumulating the wealth and there are more and more who find themselves with less and less, there are many examples throughout history of how poorly that worked out in the end. And I think you can figure out what happened to the really rich. The unfortunate thing today is that very little of that “rich” is actual, tangible assets. Very much of it is imaginary money.
It’s a little bit like sitting down to play Monopoly, but one of the other payers has about twelve game-boxes worth of cash they can spend in the game.
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