[quote=livinincali][quote=CA renter]
This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Lost in the capitalist propaganda of “risk and rewards” is the fact that most rich people take very few personal risks. More privatization of the profits and socialization of the losses…and it will always be this way until people start to wake up (which is finally starting to happen, but it’s a very slow process).[/quote]
It totally depends on how you got rich. The innovators of the world Jobs, Gates, etc probably deserve to have gotten rich. They all took significant risks. The problem is that eventually these people move on from their companies and you end up with Wharton grads running them. Most of these Grads don’t have the innovative skills of those they replaced so they start thinking in the short term and what’s good for the share price. Eventually most of them tend to run the company into the ground, but in the process they get rich. How many companies are still around from 50 years ago, 100 years ago? Not many.
Essentially you want to somehow prevent the well connected from going to Wharton and get the C-Level job because they don’t deserve to be rich in your mind. I don’t see how you can actually accomplish this though.[/quote]
Correct. This is why I’ve always differentiated between founding CEOs and “professional” CEOs (and other executive positions).
But it’s not just a matter of corporate management. The financial industry is one of the biggest problems in this country, IMO. They set themselves up to skim a portion of almost every legitimate transaction out there, yet they do very little to benefit society or the economy. We could easily set up a public bank that could facilitate transactions and even make loans to people and businesses for a fraction of the cost.
“According to the latest data from the Commerce Department, the financial sector now accounts for 8.4 percent of the United States’ Gross Domestic Product, “eclipsing the peak it hit in 2006.” In the 1950s, the financial sector accounted for less than 3 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, financial firms are once again making more than 30 percent of all corporate profits in the U.S.”
