Should CEO salaries be capped?

[Cius]

That is where you should have ended it. Putting "but" after it means that everything you say before it is not true.



Straw man right there.

Regulations have a place. To regulate the effects of a transaction that affects third parties. How much a CEO earns is none of your business. It is only the business of the people who pay him/her.



Pity that isn't true.

Real incomes are up for everyone in every country with free market policies. Which means that everyone has more money to spend. As Margret Thatcher stated, you would rather the poor be poorer and to have the gap between the rich and the poor be smaller, than the rich to be richer and the poor to be richer.

Countries that have more free market and less redistribution of income are better off than countries that have less free markets and more redistribution of income.

Are you against anti monopoly laws?

Also that last sentence is rapidly changing, especially in the USA. If you want to experience the end of this road perhaps try North Korea.

 

[konfab]

Are you against anti monopoly laws?

Depends.
Monopoly as in government monopolies, I would want as many laws against those as possible.

As for private companies, no.
You cannot define anti-competitive behaviour coherently.
If a company charges much more than its competitors, it is price gorging.
If a company charges the same as its competitors, it is price fixing.
If a company charges much less than its competitors, it is dumping.

You take all the anti-competitive stuff that the EU imposed on Microsoft about internet explorer. None of it ended up being applicable because Google ended up developing a better product and demolished their market share. So it was a complete and utter failure.

Same thing with the anti-monopoly rulings against Kodak, they were considered a monopoly by the US supreme court in 1992. It went bankrupt in 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak_Co._v._Image_Technical_Services,_Inc.

Here is the thing people don't understand about big business. The larger your organisation becomes, the more bureaucratic it has to become if it is to be efficient. The more bureaucratic it becomes, the less it is able to adapt to a market that will always be changing. Heck, the reason why the company I work for exists, is because the big businesses have so much red-tape in them that they are fundamentally incapable of innovation, hence they outsource their innovation to people who are better at it than they are.

Also that last sentence is rapidly changing, especially in the USA. If you want to experience the end of this road perhaps try North Korea.

North Korea isn't the result of free market capitalism.

 

[Mike Hoxbig]

Yet many incompetent CEOs get paid grandly too.

That's a different issue. The question then is why the incompetent CEO found himself in that position. A question you'd have to ask the board and/or shareholder.

and CEOs are sometimes rewarded for things external to them, like the company just rising due to the market tide, I'm just saying the rising tide should lift everyone a bit too.

Many companies do. But this is now linked to bonus pay and not basic salary.

BTW I don't support the capping of salaries, even at public entities. Where do you draw the line then? Before we know it our own salaries would be capped. When there is a short supply of skill, it would be hard to attract talent with salary caps in place...

 

[Brian_G]

No to capping private salaries, but on condition that the CEO's can be monitored and controlled by an ethics committee, consisting of Forumites from the Republic Of MyBB that we vote for ;- )

 

[Creag]

Private, no.
Public, government or SOE, definitely, yes.

 

[Kosmik]

No. Most companies I'm sure though have a salary band and then incentives for the ceo ala profit share etc. Salary should probably increase inflationary and the profit share would be where they smile the most and is the most fair ie: do well/badly etc.

 

[Ishould_BeWorking]

No - because they CEO is the captain and should also get chopped when he effs up