Billionaires Build

I was responding to your assertion which was "It very much does not sound like Germany+." Further, the EPI article says right up top:

> Why it matters: CEO pay is not just a symbolic issue. High CEO pay spills over into the rest of the economy and helps pull up pay for privileged managers in the corporate and even nonprofit spheres. Because pay for top managers—CEOs and others—is not driven by their contributions to economic growth, this pay can be reduced and others’ incomes boosted if we can figure out a way to restrain CEOs’ market power. Importantly, the most direct damage done by excess CEO pay is to shareholders. Since shareholders are a relatively privileged group themselves (if not as privileged as CEOs), they could potentially wield power in this situation; policymakers should try to figure out how to enlist shareholders in the fight to restrain excess managerial pay.

> Right to organize is not the same as "right to force people to join a union".

I'll try and skip to the end here and say that the union system isn't optimal. It would be a lot better if we had a solid social welfare state and, coop-style profit sharing and worker representation on corporate boards, and better laws protecting workers. But here we are. All of this stuff is to enhance the financial and collective bargaining power of unions so they can effectively advocate for workers (note I specifically didn't say "their members", as unions represent everyone, members or otherwise).

Right to work laws are meant to undermine unions' collective bargaining leverage, and they've worked [1] (those WSJ studies are real bad, anything could've caused those effects). But besides that, you can also choose to just pay agency fees, not contribute to the union's political activities, and not become a member, even without right to work laws.

> re: profit sharing

Can you cite some things here? You write "a coop is not the end-all-be-all of business structures" and "requiring it has the potential to stifle innovation" without any kind of backing. Plus, I'm not at all saying cooperatives are perfect. I think they're a good way to achieve profit sharing, but there may be other models that are better. I'd caution against the stock comp idea though; that turns into short-termism really quickly.

> co-determination

I can imagine some pitfalls a-la term limits in governments, where when they're so short you don't allow anyone time to build experience. I think compared with the management or investment classes workers have less experience making company-level decisions, and that could have some weird effects. Boards also aren't perfect, you can bribe and blackmail people. But I think in the aggregate that probably doesn't have a big effect. I'm just spitballing, I haven't read anything.

> re: taxes

Haha I haven't been called an idealist in a long time, thank you :) I don't think the US will do even a single thing on this list and is doomed in probably a dozen ways. Maybe that's why my list comes off as idealism: if you're sure you won't get anything on it, it doesn't matter what you put on it.

But re: taxes, Paul Ryan tried his whole career to simplify the tax code. Libertarians have been pushing a flat tax for a generation or more. People come out of the woodwork when things like happen [2] [3] [4] and are generally (and understandably) a little flighty at "various" winners and losers [5].

Re: tax evasion/dodging/etc., I mostly mean it all but, in particular corporate tax avoidance should be fixed [6].

Re: progressive income taxes, as you point out the US tax system is really complex. Our income taxes are progressive. But many of the taxes we pay aren't, or are very barely progressive (property taxes are generally either 1, 2, or 3% for example)--e.g. many states have a flat sales tax as their largest revenue source.

But broadly the goal here isn't to technically meet the definition of a progressive income tax, it's to bring down income inequality. Progressive income taxes can do this, but not if the net effect is to lower taxes--such as it has been in the US [7].

So I'm not saying we should do it because other people do it. I'm saying we should do it because it will work and studies show it will work, but we have to do it right, because we've been doing it wrong, and that's made it not work.

re: minimum wage

I don't care if the federal government sets the minimum wage to a living wage and pins it to CPI or if each state/district/territory does it relative to their CPI. To me that's completely beside the point.

> it is important that the federal government has policies in place... that allow people... move to another state if their current one isn't treating them well

I think theoretically this seems like a good idea, but in practice it's not that common. People aren't gonna take their kids away from their grandparents or leave their whole friend/family network because minimum wage is $1.50 higher 2 time zones away. Really this is just like, a privilege measure. Yeah if you're an NBA player you want to play in Miami or Orlando because they're bigger markets with no income tax. But if you're a roofer in Massachusetts? Moving might not even be an option.

Broadly federalism claims to solve a lot of problems but, due to a mixture of weird politics, baked-in shortcomings and geography, it's pretty ineffective most of the time. There were some cases (gay marriage, slavery, weed) it was super effective, but when you consider all the possible policies, it's batting like .00009. I actually wish federalism could work, in particular I think it's really well-suited to gun policy. But gun policy is actually a really good case study for why federalism just doesn't help.

re: at-will employment

I love this topic because I think it's like, one of those icebreaker topics--you quickly learn a lot about someone's world view from their answer to this. I do think that it seems to make a lot of sense that, as you say, "If I can hire someone for any reason, I should be able to fire someone for any reason." But here are my issues with it:

- Can you hire someone just because they're the same religion as you, or fire them because they're not, or not hire them because they're not?

- What about being gay, or ugly, overweight, or disabled? What if you're a strip club? What if you're a synagogue?

- The power balance between employers and employees is completely different. If an employee quits without warning, it's pretty rare that that employer's housing, health care, retirement savings, college savings, and food supply are threatened. If my employer fires me, it's very likely all those things are threatened, immediately.

You can see how all these things really add up in the aggregate. So much so that we had to amend the Constitution to prevent it for certain groups. But discrimination is still a huge problem, in no small part because many people believe "If I can hire someone for any reason, I should be able to fire someone for any reason." And firing or not hiring is a huge deal to people. Your entire life grows out of your ability to have money--your ability to make friends, your ability to have romantic relationships, your ability to have kids, your ability to save for retirement, etc. etc. It's such an important part of life, and we really need to take it more seriously than essentially, yolo.

> most of the time you end up being able to fire people anyway by finding some stupid reason that's valid

Eh, this can happen but, when there are laws against it, a couple of wrongful termination lawsuits chill that pretty quickly. Ask any hospital lawyer.

> California, etc.

I wouldn't mind seeing some studies about this. You might laugh at this, but I'm innately suspicious of a lot of top-down planning in a policy, and I think there is definitely a ladder-pulling dynamic to putting so many regulations on small businesses. Generally I try and advocate for cutouts for really small businesses--you shouldn't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to open a bar where only you and your family work there for example--but there are serious ill effects in the aggregate absent regulation.

I would say that the only reason at-will employment + unenforceable non-competes works is that the market for software engineers is bonkers and has been for a while. You can imagine it's probably not a party for like, the ops people.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#Studies_of_e...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23SXAYWZHc8&feature=emb_logo

[3]: https://www.aei.org/economics/how-border-adjustment-could-tr...

[4]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/koch-indu...

[5]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meet-the-new-friendlier-al...

[6]: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/tackling-...

[7]: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-taxes-a...

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Edit: I might be broadly wrong about relocation [8] but, still I think because it's almost entirely for job reasons, the point about not relocating for State policies holds.

[8]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/us-geog...

As far as pushing back against crony capitalism and corporatism goes, we are in total agreement.

(Heck, for all intents and purposes given the high marginal tax rates in many countries and the enormous amounts of waste that those governments are guilty of we're already doing just that, and the last 80ish years of human history have been pretty darn good!)