Walmart employs 2.2 million people. Its CEO earns 22 million dollars a year. If you do the math, that means that if you reduced the CEO's salary to 70k (which is about enough to live on comfortably) each individual employee would earn $10 per year more. For a full time employee, that's less than a penny per hour raise. So when you talk about taking that CEO's salary and giving it to the workers, you're ignoring the very simple fact that there are a lot of workers who also must benefit. Anyone who advocates reducing CEO salary purely because they think it will benefit workers has misplaced their sense of justice. Anyone who thinks that this action can improve the lives of individual workers beyond a negligible amount has not done the math.
So why do CEOs earn so much money? Why do I support them getting paid so much?
Well, just like everything else in a proper free market, it's all about supply and demand. Let's say that we reduce the salary of all CEOs to 70k by law. CEOs are now required to get by with what an average American household does. However, being a CEO is stressful. It's competitive. It's important. This will cause something called brain drain, where highly qualified individuals will leave the field and go do things that actually pay them what they believe they're worth. Or, in another case, people with the ability to become CEOs will never head towards that end point. Did you know that the Walmart CEO started out sweeping floors and loading trucks? He climbed up the ladder by proving his competence. His salary grew organically based on his personal ability.
A company chooses its CEO based on one thing and one thing only: track record. If an individual shows that they can handle the gigantic responsibility of running a multi-million or billion-dollar company, then they will be given that job. Individuals with the drive and savvy to run a huge company are actually quite rare. I'm not one of those people. They have to be willing to work eighty-hour weeks. They have to be willing to manage huge numbers of people and large amounts of money. They must be competent. In a world where salary is not restricted by law (otherwise we'd be in a pretty bad dystopia), a company that pays their CEO less than they should will lose that CEO to something called poaching. If a company commits to only paying their CEO 70k and giving the money to the workers, then a different company with an eye on that CEO will snap them up for 100k. Then another for 200k. Then another for 300k. This repeats until the CEO settles in a job he is worth. Do you think that a money-hungry, profit-driven company will willingly throw away large amounts of capital at a single person just to satisfy that individual person's greed? While this may happen in some cases, the truth is that CEOs make a lot of money because they're worth that much. Treat a CEO as a farmer treats a tractor. Because that's what he is to a company. Any company only invests in something that they believe will cause return. A CEO is not synonymous with his company, not by a long shot. He's an asset to the company, that the company pays for. Just like a minimum wage worker, he is hired to do a job. The real people who get the profits are shareholders. (Hint: that's you!)
Finally, with the math out of the way, it occurs to me that people believe we should "eat the rich" because they think that their individual portion of "the rich" will be more than a single raisin. Let's go through the math. Elon Musk is worth 200 billion. If we eat him, then we'll each get about $750 (Counting all 320 million Americans). If we eat all the rich, then maybe we'll get five thousand each. Maybe. You all know from your stimmy checks that five k really isn't much. Can you live for the rest of your life on that money? Can you buy more than a junk car? Can you afford gas for a year? Can you justify the brain drain that will occur? Do you really think any organization can operate functionally or efficiently without a motivated individual at the helm? Where are all those motivated individuals when you've eaten them all?
Here's the thesis of this article. Don't begrudge other people their success and their money. If you think to yourself that's my money they stole from me then you're falling into a trap. You're just as greedy as they are. You're coveting other people's stuff and coming up with justifications for it to make yourself feel good about it. Unless you're suffering as a medieval peasant while their lord literally takes their stuff and throws lavish feasts, then you're not entitled to other people's money. (No, this isn't the case for the vast majority of western nations, no matter how much you want to twist it that way. I'll argue this point in another post.) Corporations don't take your money and give you nothing in exchange. If you have to justify your ownership of rich people's money because they "took it from you" by "not paying you enough" then you really should reevaluate your idea on the matter. You know that old saying by college professors.
If you want special treatment, then I'll have to give it to everyone.
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