"So now, what's your take on the significant discrepancy between average pay for workers and corporate CEOs?" By Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 4/18/24

(Another question asked by Cousin Deb, a retired professor at Cornell University. She has a Ph.D. in Education, which she is valiantly trying to overcome. This is my emailed response.)

The CEO- average worker pay gap? Oh, that's something I worry about all the time. I can barely sleep at night thinking about that terrible, horrible injustice.

Please.

What corporations pay their CEOs and their workers are free market transactions, willingly entered into by consenting adults. Frankly, it's none of my business and it's none of yours.

I realize that people whose sense of cosmic justice is offended by what they consider to be "too much," whether a pay gap, or a salary or whatever, would like to pass a few laws to "correct" these things. Send in the Government. Badges and guns. Right.

You and I can make it our business by buying a single share in the offending corporation, attend the annual meeting and propose to shareholders that we owners adjust that CEO worker average pay gap. Now if we can't get enough shareholders to agree with us, what we can then do is gather like-minded people together and buy enough shares to simply take over the company or buy enough so we can control the board of directors.

Or maybe we can start our own company to compete against that evil corporation. Or maybe just boycott their products.

Gosh, all that would take a lot of work and might mean risking -- GASP – our own money! Oh no. Pass a law. Send in the cops! Typical authoritarian impulse of the morally superior elitist, to whom I ask: "Who made you God?"

It happens across the political spectrum, depending on the issue. Too many people want to use the power of government to "do good," e.g., some pro-lifers would jail anybody involved in an abortion, nurses to patients. Sigh.

Also, the pay gap that knots the knickers on elitist pinheads sometimes includes the result of stock options or stock sales, which can really skew the results. For example, a few years ago Elon Musk sold $3.5 billion in Tesla stock. That kind of alters the average pay gap, doesn't it?

More typically, it's stock options the CEO cashes in that causes lots of heavy breathing in the same crowd that has no problem with Claudine Gay getting paid $900K. Harvard is private, so I could give a rat's ass.

I do give a rat's ass when the president of our local WNMU is paid damn near $400k a year for a state job that I suspect could be done for much less. The government bureaucrats just take tax dollars and pay each other whatever they think they're worth. I don't like it but not much I can do about it but vote for people like me -- or become a PhD. and cash in too! (;~)

I do have a slight problem with somebody like Elon Musk making billions upon billions when Tesla's business, from cars to batteries, basically depends upon government mandates and tons of subsidies. He was smart enough to cash in, so I guess I can't blame him for taking advantage of government stupidity. That stupidity IS our business!

One last thing, the people who talk about taxing the billionaires as if those billionaires did something wrong or evil, don't seem to realize that the great preponderance of billionaires in this country support liberal causes. The Google boys, Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett, Bezos and on and on and on.

I'd rather have a society where entrepreneurs get filthy rich, even liberal ones, than live in a society that punishes success out of some moral outrage at a perceived "inequality." Bezos has billions of dollars in Amazon stock, the price of which is in some small part due to my business at Amazon and thank you Jeff, you liberal asshole. He didn't steal a penny of his wealth and I have benefited greatly from his genius.

I say don't put extra taxes on any billionaire, lib or otherwise, because that means taking money out of private hands and putting it in government hands. No thank you. The government didn't earn that money, in spite of what Obama says.

The same goes for estate taxes, which should be zero. People who think heirs shouldn't enjoy money that they didn't earn are making moral judgments, playing God again. That also takes money out of the private sector and puts it in the public sector, which is usually wasted.

Other than that, Deb, I don't have any opinion on the topic.