Can your reconcile this:
Kenneth C. Griffin, who received more than $1 billion last year as chairman of a hedge fund, the Citadel Investment Group, declared: “The money is a byproduct of a passionate endeavor.”
Mr. Griffin, 38, argued that those who focus on the money — and there is always a get-rich crowd — “soon discover that wealth is not a particularly satisfying outcome.” His own team at Citadel, he said, “loves the problems they work on and the challenges inherent to their business.”
with this:
“In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.”
So much for passionate endeavor. I guess that sounds a lot better than “mine, mine, mine!”
Contrast that with the founder and chairman of Costco:
“If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.’s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.”
There is the old Ben & Jerry’s notion that the CEO can’t make more than 10 times what a line worker makes: some linkage between the humble and the great would be good thing, I think. A CEO who employs minimum wage workers would be limited to about $150K. Want more? Find a way to pay the folks at the bottom more.
And then there’s Andrew Carnegie
“[who] made it abundantly clear that the centerpiece of his gospel of wealth philosophy was that individuals do not create wealth by themselves,” said David Nasaw, a historian at City University of New York and the author of “Andrew Carnegie” (Penguin Press). “The creator of wealth in his view was the community, and individuals like himself were trustees of that wealth.”
So a person in a wealthy country is well-off because of where they live, but that wealth is part of the community, of society.
Repaying the community did not mean for Carnegie raising the wages of his steelworkers. Quite the contrary, he sometimes cut wages and, in doing so, presided over violent antiunion actions.
Carnegie did not concern himself with income inequality. His whole focus was philanthropy. He favored a confiscatory estate tax for those who failed to arrange to return, before their deaths, the fortunes the community had made possible.
It’s no surprise that a poor immigrant from Scotland would be against inherited wealth. How would he see his self-proclaimed heirs? While he built libraries and community centers across the country, are today’s rich spreading it around the same way? Or are they re-inforcing the concentration of wealth in NYC?
Continue reading “well, which is it?”