This is why Thomas Sowell isn’t allowed on national TV.
He makes the stooges look like the fools they are.
If a corporate executive makes 100 million dollars a year, I could care less, unless that corporate executive happens to be standing before congress begging for tax dollars to keep his stupid company afloat. In that case, I want his goat to die.
There is an old Russian fable, with different versions in other countries, about two poor peasants, Ivan and Boris. The only difference between them was that Boris had a goat and Ivan didn't. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp and, when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything in the world.
Ivan said, "I want Boris' goat to die."
A better analogy for the big three car companies would be Boris has been abusing his goat for a long time and now wants to stick me with its vet bills, so I wish Ivan would die and the goat could have a better owner.
The average pay of a CEO of a corporation big enough to be included in the Standard & Poor's index is less than one-third of what Alex Rodriguez makes, about one-tenth of what Tiger Woods makes and less than one-thirtieth of what Oprah Winfrey makes.
One huge difference. Woods and Winfrey both make their money based on their own skills. If Tiger decided that under par golf took too much work and aimed at a +5 score every round, his pay would drop like a rock. Similarly if Oprah lost her audience, her ad revenue and pay would drop. Corporate CEOs never seem to have that problem. Lose a billion a month and other CEOs on your company's compensation committee will decide you need a big raise. And guess what - since you are sitting on their compensation committees you vote on them getting big raises too at the expense of their shareholders. Sorry, CEO pay is just way to incestuous for my taste. I don't want government to get involved, but don't ask me to cheer for it as the ultimate meritocracy. Performance and reward have been completely divorced.
Then when those same CEOs come and rattle their tin cups and demand that I pay them a few tens or hundreds of billions to cover their failures, don't ask me to just comply quietly. That is what bankruptcy court is there for, to decide whether your creditors would be better off coming to more agreeable payment terms or selling your assets and closing your doors. Just as I felt the right, no the duty to complain about how welfare queens lived their lives on my dime and tell them to straighten up before they get money, I feel a million times more vehement about it for the gigawelfare queens of corporate America.
Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows this is true. The problem we have now is that those who have seized power do not want to change things.
Sowell is fantastic, of course. And I agree with much of what he says.
But I do have a little problem with what he says in the citation above. It's becoming clear that the most important contributing factor to the financial meltdown did grow out of a "deregulated," or at least improperly regulated, segment of the financial markets, i.e., the 30 year old derivative markets, most especially Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and the even newer financial instruments, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). The side markets that investment banks created to profit from these derivatives, when mixed with stable or falling home prices, eventually undermined the entire economy.
For an enlightening examination of the topic, read Michael Lewis' piece in Portfolio, which can be found here.
Sowell does it again.
Why couldn’t he be the first black president?
Yeah, I know. He’s too smart.
Thomas Sowell/Walter Williams 2012
If we had to have an “African hyphen American” for POTUS, why couldn’t it have been Thomas Sowell first?
There is a difference between professional athletes and CEO's. If the athelete's don't perform, they get traded, or their contract is not renewed. A CEO can run a company into the ground, go to the taxpayer and beg for money, and if the business still fails, they walk away with millions, rewarded for their poor performance.
Excellent. Thomas Sowell bump!
How do you think Oprah would like that?
Even better is the Russian story where God promises to do something to reward Ivan, but because he is a better person he will give double that amount to Boris.
So Ivan tells God to make him blind in one eye.....
self-ping