Theory How to make corporations work for the benefit of the public

[Shockadee]

Afternoon daydreaming, thinking about everything that's been going on.

Wondering how we make corporations and government work in favour of the people. If it was changed, how to make the change permanent enough to actually last, before becoming corrupt, but also be flexible enough to resist corruption.

What incentives or rule changes or priority could be made to ensure the people and not the systems pockets are filled?

That is without succumbing to becoming a totalitarian socialist state.


I've been playing with the idea that C - suite individuals should only be allowed to make a multiple of the lowest paid employee in terms of salary.

 

[Hirudinea]

Afternoon daydreaming, thinking about everything that's been going on.

Wondering how we make corporations and government work in favour of the people. If it was changed, how to make the change permanent enough to actually last, before becoming corrupt, but also be flexible enough to resist corruption.

What incentives or rule changes or priority could be made to ensure the people and not the systems pockets are filled?

That is without succumbing to becoming a totalitarian socialist state.


I've been playing with the idea that C - suite individuals should only be allowed to make a multiple of the lowest paid employee in terms of salary.

Shockadee
No more foreign workers would be a good start.

 

[Reeenorseman]

A tiny mustache

 

[Canada Eh]

That is too funny haha

 

[Picard]

you want private businesses to serve people, and limit how much money people can make based on what someone else makes? umm yah you're describing a version of communism or socialism man. do you think all corporations are multi-billion dollar outfits? a huge portion of small businesses are corporations, I don't think you're thought this through much at all

 

[Shockadee]

The idea is to tighten the wealth gap.

I do think Company owners should be able to take whatever they want from the business, but executives should only be allowed to be paid say 700% more than the bottom wagie. The idea being that in order for the exec to get a raise, the guy on the bottom gets a proportional raise too as salaries are shifted upwards. This helps to preserve the wealth gap. I. e. Company profits = rising wage for everyone. When times are tough and profits are down, no increases happen because presumably the top guys are getting 700% more than the bottom and are paying themselves as much as is being allowed. This way management can't give itself raises if they are not successful.

 

[Thinker]

More issue with government monetary policy and fiat systems in general. We are just patching over real issue instead of actually dealing with it.

 

[Picard]

You are conflating corporations with large businesses. Virtually every doctor and dentist in Canada owns a corporation, it is a very common business structure. That being said, do you think that a CEO of one of these very large businesses has as much value as the janitor? You typically earn what you are worth, what somebody else makes has nothing to do with what you make. Let’s say we don’t work at the same business, and I make 700x more than you in my life. Do you think that you should get some of my money because I make a lot more than you? Also, do you think the CEO unilaterally decides how much they get paid? There is a board and they vote on pay structures. I really don’t think you have put much thought into this and you are in fact describing something that is communist or socialist in nature.

 

[Thinker]

Business culture is fundamentally broken. This law if implemented just paves over this dysfunctional culture that caused by more dysfunctional economic policy.

Either way every time you implement more complexity within a system. It takes more power to maintain it. Even new tools to navigate all the information is needs to generate to function. To a point where the latest tool, LLMs. Takes large cities of power in order to make it work.

 

[Thinker]

This is delicate question. Usually most governments should not be involved in private relationships of it's citizens specially with financial transactions. You could remove corporate personhood from these corporations have the executive staff be directly responsible for the actions of the corporation. This is how a lot of pre-20th century business legally operated as.

Remove women out large corporations and businesses they either should be working within a family business or staying at home.

In general the entire North American business culture is kind of screwed and it might take a major upheaval for anything to change.

 

[Hirudinea]

Interesting idea about corporate personhood.

 

[Thinker]

Yes, if CEO and executive team will double guess their decisions if they legally held liable to their actions. Although doing this will completely flip over the table on how business loans and environment have been working for over century.

 

[Hirudinea]

@Thinker

Would flipping the table be a bad thing? But I am the first to admit I am ignorant of economics above "don't spend more than you earn", so I really wouldn't know.

 

[Thinker]

@Hirudinea
Yes, it will effect everything. From the small guy to largest corporation.

 

[adragons]

Normalize investing based on corporate charters.

Example: patagonia is woke, but they donate 1% of sales to environmental causes. They help fund wells in africa, preserving forests, and planting trees, etc. Real effort, not fake ESG or virtue signaling.

Most corporations charters' are just "do what is legal" and follow their fiduciary duty. This leads to psychopaths who can't organically grow a company, so they achieve growth by 'cost cutting'.

 

[Jack Layton]

Create value. The public should be able to vote on stuff, whether a company gets a government contract, even Bills instead of like 200 people hiding conflict.

 

[Thinker]

Same issue with Athens when they introduced Direct Democracy. It will fail as people will simply will not care to vote even if you pay them.

 

[Shockadee]

Yet on the opposite end is Australia where it's the law that everyone has to Vote. However many are apathetic or work the system to avoid it.

 

[Hirudinea]

@Shockadee

That is true but is Australia in any better shape than Canada or the UK, etc...? Forcing people to make a choice doesn't mean they will make a wise choice. If somebody doesn't want to vote it's probably a good idea to let them not vote in my opinion.

 

[Shockadee]

@Hirudinea I agree completely.

 

[brutana_dilewski]

@Shockadee If you haven't read Thomas Sowell, I recommend him. A Conflict of Visions specifically, but even his book 'Basic Economics' (which I started with) is fantastic.

Sowell does a good job explaining how the process is more important than the outcome. For instance, you mentioned how you want to close the wealth gap. I won't speak 100% for Sowell, but he would argue that you cannot legislate such a thing via economic policy simply because people have too many variables in the choices they make for them ever to equal out. Instead, it would be far better for government to get out of the way and allow for more competition. Of course, corporatism is rampant these days, and that's not going to get solved without some sort of major overhaul of government bureaucracy.

However if the goal is to allow for greater economic mobility among the working population, then it would be wiser to allow the market to set labour prices rather than having the government fix the price of labour. It is far better to work for a low wage until you gain the experience necessary to advance rather than get priced out of an entry-level job because the government dictates that all jobs must pay X dollars per hour. These policies make it more attractive to pay illegals under the table.

I don't really see the reason for regulating how much a CEO gets paid for example. If it's not public sector, I don't see how the government gets a say in setting market prices. Over-regulation and excess overhead that comes with government control is far more expensive. Its partly why many businesses avoid Canada - it's expensive to start up a business here.

 

[Sgt. Goosenip]

You seem to be approaching the problem from a social-engineering perspective, where rules and regulations might be orchestrated to bring about the desired result. Deeper matters involving what the culture ultimately values and its source of meaning are presumably overlooked or left unchanged.

Personally, I think the answer has to be more bottom-up, within each person and larger culture. There are historical precedents. These include valuing genuine merit and an authentic aristocracy, justice (you get what you deserve), and perhaps most importantly, ‘noblesse oblige’ - those in positions of power and who hold abundant wealth have an obligation, duty, or responsibility to assist their nation and fellow neighbours and uphold all that is good and true. At one time, giving food and gifts was a sign of nobility and abundant strength. I think we need to get back to some of that, which is a shift in values and beliefs as opposed to superficial change in fiscal policy.

 

[Hirudinea]

‘noblesse oblige’

That is a concept we should bring back.

 

[ButteryBastard]

You’ll find that regulating any of this will either have people committing crimes to avoid the legislation or the corporations will simply leave.

If you say to a CEO of a successful, multi-billion dollar company that their salary will be capped to some multiple of their lowest paid employee, they will abide by it. Then they will also receive huge performance bonuses so their salary remains under your legislated level. If you make bonuses count towards income, they will switch to receiving the same amount in equity of the company. If you make equity count, they will find a way to get the money a different way. This already happens btw. These are standard c-suite salary packages.

If you make an absolutely iron-clad law that caps their earnings the company will simply relocate their headquarters to a jurisdiction that doesn’t do that. If you say well then they can’t do business in Canada without abiding by these rules, you’ll have to shut out every major corporation that isn’t Canadian. Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Google, etc. It isn’t tenable.

There is a huge wealth gap between mid-wage government employees and comparable private sector employees. Start there. There is no reason why some mid-level paper pusher should get a lifetime pension for their bullshit unionized email job. Their pensions are funded by the tax payers. How is that fair that someone who does the same job at a private company should be taxed so some government stooge can get a guaranteed income for the rest of their lives? Or guaranteed wage increases?

Not to mention the rampant abuse of the audit system that determines the equivalency of government jobs in the private sector to determine their salaries. There are government cashiers making $50-60k a year because of the heap of bullshit they wrote on their list of duties. “Handled critical financial transactions that had direct impact on the bottom line of the department, while maintaining accuracy and expediency” aka took money and gave change so the customer could leave.

The problems all start with the government. Fix that and the rest will barely seem like an issue.