I WAS AFRAID
I was afraid. I was recently reading an article by Prof. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under the Clintons and now teaching at University of California at Berkeley. I was agreeing with Prof. Reich. Any time I agree with Prof. Reich it scares me. He was defending large pay packages for Chief Executive Officers (CEO’s) of major corporations. Essentially he opined most star quality CEO’s are worth their exorbitant pay packages if they can negotiate them from the corporation’s board of directors. His defense of allowing boards, shareholders and CEO’s to negotiate in the free market to set pay packages was atypical of him. Normally he rants about corporate greed, oppression of the workers and the need for government control of all aspects of business, as expected from an extreme liberal. Many people are repulsed by sky high CEO pay packages as unfair in some undefined way. Usually the same people have no problem with Hollywood celebrities or sports demigods receiving higher pay than anyone other than a few top CEO’s in the country. I always think of Barbra Streisand getting 10 million dollars a night for a series of performances in Las Vegas a few years ago. Many times there are calls for Congress to legislate pay caps for CEO’s, but not stars or athletes, as a way to impose some idealized fairness into the system. I would have thought that Prof. Reich would be in this camp. Finally, I understood my fear as I read Prof. Reich’s last paragraph where he calls for "a higher marginal tax rate on the super pay of those in super demand." I realized that if CEO pay were legislatively limited, a company, instead of paying the executive, would retain the ‘excess’ amount and could pay other workers, raise dividends or build new factories - all options totally unacceptable to a liberal. On the other hand, by letting the CEO negotiate a super pay package and then super taxing the pay, any benefit would be stripped away from the private sector, CEO, company or shareholder, and instead accrue into the hands of the government to be disposed of by politicians. Does any true American want that? Simply, Mr. Reich’s real intent is to find a way to remove the country’s wealth from the private sector and put into the incompetent hands of government.
Hillary Clinton, shrilled that as President, "I want to take those profits and put them into alternative energy..." This outburst came during a February 2007 campaign speech when she attacked Exxon for too much profit from high oil and gas prices last year. Such an attitude expresses the concept that all wealth really belongs to the government; private citizens and corporations have the use of their wealth only at the sufferance of the government. Exxon, one of the largest oil companies in the world, had offended her sense of ‘fairness’ by earning 37 billion dollars in profit in 2006. She neglects to mention that Exxon already paid the top corporate tax rate on those earnings. And, she certainly does not want the public to know that the government is already collecting an extra 18.4 cents on every gallon of gasoline sold, far more than Exxon earns per gallon. Exxon prospects, drills, refines, delivers and pumps the gasoline for it’s lesser share of the profit while the federal government only sits back and waits for the gas station owner to send in 18.4 cents for every gallon you pump.
The common thread in both Prof. Reich’s and Sen..Clinton’s plans is to gather all wealth to the government and then have the bureaucrat wizards redistribute the wealth as they see fit. The name given to the concept that wealth does not belong to the creator, producer or the worker but to the government is Socialism. We all remember Socialism’s ugly child is communism. Sen. Clinton, in one of the recent debates, waffled on her ideology. She wandered through the evolution of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’, said she believed in the best of both, avoided the word Socialism and concluded she should be called a Progressive. Fuzzy, but Politically Correct. Her programs, however, all claim power and wealth to the government. This is usually called Socialism where wealth belongs to the government to be distributed by ideological whim.
Central planning of a society - that is the government deciding who pays what, who gets what and what it is that you get - has a socialistic effect. Even the late Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU describes socialism as, "everybody poor together." When politicians and academics ask, no order, me to turn over my wallet to the beneficent government and the have the government ‘ take care’ of me, I am very afraid.
I was afraid. I was recently reading an article by Prof. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under the Clintons and now teaching at University of California at Berkeley. I was agreeing with Prof. Reich. Any time I agree with Prof. Reich it scares me. He was defending large pay packages for Chief Executive Officers (CEO’s) of major corporations. Essentially he opined most star quality CEO’s are worth their exorbitant pay packages if they can negotiate them from the corporation’s board of directors. His defense of allowing boards, shareholders and CEO’s to negotiate in the free market to set pay packages was atypical of him. Normally he rants about corporate greed, oppression of the workers and the need for government control of all aspects of business, as expected from an extreme liberal. Many people are repulsed by sky high CEO pay packages as unfair in some undefined way. Usually the same people have no problem with Hollywood celebrities or sports demigods receiving higher pay than anyone other than a few top CEO’s in the country. I always think of Barbra Streisand getting 10 million dollars a night for a series of performances in Las Vegas a few years ago. Many times there are calls for Congress to legislate pay caps for CEO’s, but not stars or athletes, as a way to impose some idealized fairness into the system. I would have thought that Prof. Reich would be in this camp. Finally, I understood my fear as I read Prof. Reich’s last paragraph where he calls for "a higher marginal tax rate on the super pay of those in super demand." I realized that if CEO pay were legislatively limited, a company, instead of paying the executive, would retain the ‘excess’ amount and could pay other workers, raise dividends or build new factories - all options totally unacceptable to a liberal. On the other hand, by letting the CEO negotiate a super pay package and then super taxing the pay, any benefit would be stripped away from the private sector, CEO, company or shareholder, and instead accrue into the hands of the government to be disposed of by politicians. Does any true American want that? Simply, Mr. Reich’s real intent is to find a way to remove the country’s wealth from the private sector and put into the incompetent hands of government.
Hillary Clinton, shrilled that as President, "I want to take those profits and put them into alternative energy..." This outburst came during a February 2007 campaign speech when she attacked Exxon for too much profit from high oil and gas prices last year. Such an attitude expresses the concept that all wealth really belongs to the government; private citizens and corporations have the use of their wealth only at the sufferance of the government. Exxon, one of the largest oil companies in the world, had offended her sense of ‘fairness’ by earning 37 billion dollars in profit in 2006. She neglects to mention that Exxon already paid the top corporate tax rate on those earnings. And, she certainly does not want the public to know that the government is already collecting an extra 18.4 cents on every gallon of gasoline sold, far more than Exxon earns per gallon. Exxon prospects, drills, refines, delivers and pumps the gasoline for it’s lesser share of the profit while the federal government only sits back and waits for the gas station owner to send in 18.4 cents for every gallon you pump.
The common thread in both Prof. Reich’s and Sen..Clinton’s plans is to gather all wealth to the government and then have the bureaucrat wizards redistribute the wealth as they see fit. The name given to the concept that wealth does not belong to the creator, producer or the worker but to the government is Socialism. We all remember Socialism’s ugly child is communism. Sen. Clinton, in one of the recent debates, waffled on her ideology. She wandered through the evolution of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’, said she believed in the best of both, avoided the word Socialism and concluded she should be called a Progressive. Fuzzy, but Politically Correct. Her programs, however, all claim power and wealth to the government. This is usually called Socialism where wealth belongs to the government to be distributed by ideological whim.
Central planning of a society - that is the government deciding who pays what, who gets what and what it is that you get - has a socialistic effect. Even the late Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU describes socialism as, "everybody poor together." When politicians and academics ask, no order, me to turn over my wallet to the beneficent government and the have the government ‘ take care’ of me, I am very afraid.
posted by CAROLYN at 4:28 PM
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