Capitalism the Right Way...Kudos...

You won't often hear me say nice things about many billionaires, so pay attention.

Thank you, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Thank you as well, Warren Buffet.

There--it hurt, but I said it in public.

The news that prompted this outpouring of public gratitude was the announcement that Buffet will donate a large portion of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity that spends a good part of the Gates fortune on world health and educational issues; and Gates' announcement that he will divorce himself from his Chief Software Architect post at Microsoft to spend more time running the foundation.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is how capitalism is supposed to work---after using capital to amass more wealth than one could possibly spend in a lifetime, they are working now on attacking Great Problems, in the fashion of the Rockafellers and the Carnegies. With this many resources to throw at the issues (Buffet is bequeathing $31 BILLION) we can expect great strides to be made.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/business/27friends.html

Maybe We're Going At This Wrong....

Mind The (CEO Pay) Gap - Forbes.com

An interesting little story about how the American executive can be expected to see his compensation package grow more slowly in coming years due to globalization...it got me to thinking that maybe we're approaching the issue of the widening gap between the rich and the poor the wrong way.

Maybe, instead of a minimum wage, we should have a maximum wage...say, oh, 20 times the wage of the lowest paid contractor in the company. As it stands at the present, there is no incentive, indeed dis-incentives exist, for the captain of the corporation to level the pay scale throughout the organization.


With a maximum wage in effect, the CEO would take care to make sure the janitorial contractor got a living wage--it would affect his potential salary far more than a performance-based package would, and it would have the effect of narrowing the gap between rich and poor far better than a tax-based redistribution scheme would.

I have no illusions that if such a scheme were enacted in the United States, there would not be massive flight of capital from the country--indeed, I would expect that there would soon be no corporations based here. There must be a way to get competent people to run corporations other than throwing bucketfuls of money at them; perhaps there are even a few that would enjoy working in an organization where the suits and the grunts enjoy closer lifestyle and sense of purpose and value in the company.

Ken Lay and the Courts...a Feel-Good sentence

Well, a jury of people that Ken Lay certainly would not accept as peers deliberated and found the former Enron CEO guilty of fraud and other charges, and it looks like he gets a Neo-Nazi named Bubba for his roomie for up to 30 years. This is a good start--but by no means enough.


Having him rot in jail for the remainder of his days does not pay for the damage he has done--to investors, to employees and to the economy. We need to go further. The government needs to seize every penny he or his family owns, every asset, every palatial home, every fancy car, every bit of jewelry. No hiding place or shelter should save his family from penury, as they all benefited from his crime. The crying shame is that most of his wealth is probably very well hidden in some offshore bank or corporation where his family and other cronies will be able to enjoy it.


The thought of Jeff Skilling working in the prison laundry does warm the heart. Add the spice of seeing his family impoverished, and maybe we can think that the American justice system is not completely owned by the rich.


Let's get the bankruptcy courts and government investigators busy tracking down their ill-gotten gains before they all vanish, and maybe the folks who lost their asses on believing these jokers will see a little justice by getting some of their money back.