Few statements better illustrate the dismissive condescension of a government official in a headlong power-grab:
Whatever one believes about the merits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare), or whichever way the Supreme Court decides this law, the question of constitutionality was real. The concerns were there throughout the deliberations, in bipartisan opposition to the law, and in its lingering unpopularity to this day. But if one is blinded by their authoritarian ambitions, such concerns remain invisible to them.
Well, Ms. Pelosi, many of us were in fact more concerned about a dramatic and potentially unconstitutional expansion of government power over the most private part of our private lives than we were dazzled by the promise of unfettered access to low cost health care. We were serious about that concern. We didn’t deserve to be treated like dirt to be brushed off.
This video perfectly encapsulates the difference between the Mother Jones and Inc. views of the world:
So, the new definition of harsh working conditions include: Working in a quiet setting; having to bend over and to stand on your tippy toes; doing your job as fast and as well as you can. Oh the horror.
This kind of reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed in America,” a manual on how to complain about not having everything given to you. I learned about that insipid book only because it was required reading at my kid’s Upper West Side school, apparently in the module on becoming an effete intellectual incapable of manual labor. (For those of you who were forced to endure its 240 pages of whining, here is the inspiring antidote.)
A couple of things make me hopeful. First, reality intrudes. I know a few of the kids who were indoctrinated along with mine, and—like my kids—quickly figured out that what they learned in their gym class was more important than what they learned in their social studies; the real world is a competitive place; you either learn to love hard work, or you learn to accept being an also-ran.
Second, the zeitgeist seems to be changing. I was apparently not the only person who found this ‘story’ execrable. Check out the comments on Yahoo, which draws from a far-from-conservative crowd. Nearly everyone there ridiculed this story.
That is one of the main arguments being put forth in the continuing assault on corporations in the form of new proposals for binding Say on Pay.
The short answer is “No.” Shareholders are not “owners” like Ma and Pa who own their store and have decision rights with respect to its management. Shareholders have no legal say in the operations of their company unless one changes the law to give them that say. Shareholders can’t set prices for the products their companies sell. They can’t sign off on what the companies pay for supplies, including their supply of labor. Who would give them such power, unless they wanted to destroy the corporation as we know it? The question answers itself.
People making the argument that CEO pay is different from other kinds of costs invariably avoid the implication of that argument. What they mean is that CEO pay “seems” too high (against all kinds of irrelevant standards that no one would really argue in an honest debate about the best interests of shareholders). What they leave out is the possibility that paying a lesser amount can, at least in some situations, have an impact on the company far more costly than the reduction in pay they presumably desire. In other words, the decisions by boards of what to pay their executives are strategically significant, with a profound impact on shareholder value. The Say on Pay mob ignores the existence of that impact, and makes no allowance for even well-functioning boards doing a job that can’t possibly be done as well by outside “owners.” (Please spare us the idiotic response of CEOs not possibly being worth what they are paid by their “owners.” You try to buy a $5 million home for $1 million, and see the response you’d get from the owners.)
There is no doubt some fat in the pay of some executives. But once you change the law to give shareholders an axe to wield at that kind of corporate fat, you can’t take it back just because there is a lot of blood when they try to use it.
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