A
MINORITY VIEW
BY
WALTER E. WILLIAMS
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2014
Part
of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that
agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation’s chief
executive officer’s earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published
salary comparisons in “Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries” (http://tinyurl.com/c2b24rv).
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes
66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf’s
salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match
CEO Michael Duke’s $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning
$75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt’s $3.3 million salary. For people with
little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on
the fairness issue, let’s look at some high salaries that progressives ignore.
Forbes
lists the “Highest-Paid Football Players 2013” (http://tinyurl.com/kw4dv3d). Drew
Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints
organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match
Brees’ salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los
Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It
would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to
match the earnings of Brady and Bryant.
But
the “unfair” salaries of sports players pale in comparison with movie stars. According
to Forbes' listing of the highest-paid actors (http://tinyurl.com/k3p8djs), Robert
Downey Jr. earned $75 million from June 2012 to June 2013. Channing Tatum: $60
million. Hugh Jackman: $55 million. Let’s suppose the cameraman working with
Downey earned $60,000. It would take the salaries of 1,250 of them to equal his
salary. Oprah Winfrey’s 2012 salary came to $165 million, thousands of times what
the earnings of people who work for her are.
Though
sports and Hollywood personalities earn multiples of CEO salaries, you’ll never
find leftists and progressives picketing and criticizing them. Why? The
strategy for want-to-be tyrants is to demonize people whose power they want to
usurp. That’s the typical way tyrants gain power. They give the masses someone
to hate. In 18th-century France, it was Maximilien Robespierre’s promoting
hatred of the aristocracy that led to his acquiring dictatorial power. In the
20th century, the communists gained power by promoting public hatred of the
czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler gained power by promoting
hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks.
I’m
not equating America’s progressives and liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin
and Hitler. I am saying that promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective
strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage
businesses. It’s not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were,
politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire
Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars. But there is no way that
politicians could usurp the roles of Drew Brees, Kobe Bryant, Robert Downey Jr.
and Oprah Winfrey. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they
want and it matters not one iota politically. Do you think President Barack Obama
would stoke the fires of hate and envy by remarking that he thinks that
"at a certain point, you've made enough money” -- as he did in a 2010
Quincy, Ill., speech -- in regard to the salaries of Winfrey, Brees and
Hollywood celebrities?
Why
the high salaries? Ask yourself: If a corporate board of directors could hire a
person for $45,000 who could do what a CEO could do, why would they pay CEOs
millions? If an NFL team owner could hire a person with the athletic ability
and decision-making capacity of Drew Brees for $100,000, why would he pay Brees
$40 million? If some other actor could have created as many box-office receipts,
why would movie producers have paid Downey $75 million?
There's
another important issue. If one company has an effective CEO, it is not the
only company that would like to have him on the payroll. In order to keep him,
the company must pay him enough so that he can't be lured elsewhere.
Walter
E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out
more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate
writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
