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I don’t really know if the top 100 CEOs are over paid or not, but at least someone must find their skills valuable enough to pay an average of $6.64 million. A business wants to make a lot of money and any competent board of directors would not allow such a huge amount of money to be spent on one salary if they didn’t think it was worth it. The skills needed to be a CEO is unique and specialized enough that it calls for a high salary.
Hugh Mackenzie, the representative of the CPA, does not concede this argument:
The typical explanation — that companies need to offer their chief executive millions in order to attract, keep and motivate a suitable leader — doesn’t hold water, Mackenzie said.
“You could ask how motivating is it for the average employee, who is actually the person who generates the income for the corporation, to see that their CEO is making 300 times what they are. I would think that would be kind of demotivating.”
The above statement wants me to rip my hair out for a couple of reasons.
First I do not find it “demotivating” that my boss makes more money than me. I find it motivating because it makes me want to be so good at my job that one day I will get his job. If he was paid the same as me I wouldn’t want his job and I would only work as hard as I had to for my employer not to fire me.
Second is the assumption inherent in claiming that it is the “average employee who is actually the person who generates the income for the corporation.” This a Marxist economic concept that has been debunked so many times that I doubt even many Marxists still believe in it. A CEO of a company is not a leech off the workers; the manager of a company does add economic value to the company.
I think part of Mr. Mackenzie’s problem is that he doesn’t seem to actually understand what a CEO does. Really I don’t understand what a CEO does either. Do you? Does Mr. Mackenzie imagine that the average CEO spends his day drinking scotch in his office laughing at all the poor people?
You know what, forget it. Even if he does know exactly what a CEO does it still wouldn’t make his complaint valid. Just because Mr. Mackenzie doesn’t value the skills needed to be a CEO doesn’t mean that no one should.
I think that it is absurd that people are paid millions of dollars just because they are proficient at hitting a ball with a stick. It would be arrogant of me to say that they shouldn’t be paid so much, just as it is arrogant of Mr. Mackenzie.
2 comments:
I think what's even more hilarious is the fact that the CCPA continues to claim that they're non-partisan when in reality, their left-leaning, socialist bias couldn't be more obvious. They are a joke.
What's an even bigger piece of garbage is their book called "The Harper Record." It's not fit for substituting toilet paper.
And for the record, their so-called "progressive policies" are anything but. They are about as backward and repressive as can be.
I would say that they are non-partisan but with a clear conceptual framework that informs their research.
Of course that conceptual framework is a load of garbage, but they are too my knowledge not particularly partisan.
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