Let's talk class warfare and CEO salaries

This is one of the free newsletters, but there’s a lot more going on here at Tilting at Windmills. If you enjoy this content, please consider a paid subscription. It’s 15 percent off the $5 per month or $55 per year and you get this as well as the premium posts. Or, if you’re not ready for that kind of commitment, you can tip me via my Ko-fi page. Let's talk class warfare and CEO salaries TOM KNIGHTON JAN 22 books on white wooden shelf Photo by the blowup on Unsplash Class warfare isn’t a side effect of Marxism, it’s an essential ingredient. Without it, there’s nowhere for socialism to take hold. One reason the US has been less inclined toward socialism in the past is that we had enough economic mobility that it was virtually impossible for class resentment to exist in a sufficient degree. But it exists and those who suffer from it often think they’re a lot smarter than they are. Upgrade to paid I say this because, out of boredom, I clicked on one of those clickbait posts that accumulate screenshots from all over the internet and present them like it’s original reporting. It was about “toxic work culture” and, to be fair, there were some glaring examples of toxic workplaces. And that’s when I came across this “argument.” It’s not unique and I’ve seen it countless times before, but I don’t think I’ve ever addressed it. Top Heavy Now, let’s look at Amazon for an example. First, the CEO’s salary plunged, but that number was pretty much right at the time. Amazon has over 1.5 million employees, though. If you took every single penny from the CEO’s salary and gave it to all the other employees, they’d made a whopping $138 more per year. (And that doesn’t get into the fact that the average Amazon salary is closer to $60,000 per year, making that even less noticeable.) But let’s look at Gamestop. I’m going to play with the numbers just a bit in that I’m going to use that salary figure and compare it against the number of employees Gamestop had in 2023. The company has been contracting, so this gives the benefit to the original poster here. And yep, if you divide that $16.8 million by the 12,000 employees, you get a whole $1,400 extra per year. That’s just over $100 per month. I’m sure no one would sneeze at it, but it’s also not exactly pulling anyone out of poverty. Still, a lot of people blast CEOs—and the rich in general—because they figure no one should be making so much. What could a CEO possibly do that would warrant that kind of a payday, right? The problem is that running a business is hard. Nine out of 10 small businesses close within the first five years. Nine out of 10 of the survivors shut down in the next five years. That’s roughly five percent of small businesses that last 10 years, and small businesses are a lot easier to run than large corporations. “Oh, but large corporations don’t face the same challenges small businesses face,” someone might counter, and they’re right. They don’t. They face different challenges. Someone else might figure that large corporations are generally self-healing, that they don’t go belly up because they have further to contract, which is also accurate. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. 52 percent of companies that were on the Fortune 500 list 20 years ago don’t even exist anymore. So yeah, there are challenges and the stakes are a lot higher. When I shut down my newspaper, a few freelancers had to find another place to sell their work and a few vendors I used lost my business. When a Fortune 500 company shuts down, thousands of lives can be destroyed. That’s why it’s important to understand the stakes here, and why a corporate CEO isn’t something that just grows on trees. Almost anyone can pick orders for Amazon, but not just anyone can actually run Amazon. If you take away those big salaries, though, how many people are going to jump at the opportunity to take on these massive challenges for middle class compensation? I sure as hell wouldn’t do it, especially since a CEO is basically on call night and day no matter where in the world they are. But Marxism doesn’t want people to understand this. It doesn’t want you to understand things like risk, either, which is why the company owner shouldn’t actually make a profit and all of it should go to the workers in a Marxist society. At the end of the day, though, all this class warfare nonsense is predicated on one thing and one thing only, the one thing Marx figured would motivate people to be extremely stupid. Jealousy. See, all this talk about CEO salaries is really just because these folks want you to be jealous that someone has what you don’t. It doesn’t matter that you couldn’t do their job in your wildest dreams, you need to be jealous that they have what you not only don’t have but figure you can’t. I’m not going to make $200 million or more per year at any point in this life. You’re probably not going to, either. But the difference is that we generally don’t begrudge other people’s success. We simply work hard to have as much of our own success as humanly possible. Marxism, however, doesn’t like that. I suppose I should almost be thankful that American Marxism focuses on race and gender rather than income. I probably would be, too, if they didn’t find a way to complain about all of it. Especially when it’s their complaints tend to be just this level of stupid. Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Your support is greatly appreciated. Tilting At Windmills. © 2024 Tom Knighton 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104