1. Any American companies that outsource jobs should be subject to a selective tariff for any goods or services they subsequently re-import. This idea is designed to provide disincentive for the companies to outsource in the first place. American companies that move their headquarters
outside the United States (to the Cayman Islands, for instance) in order to avoid the tariffs should be similarly treated.
2. As in Germany, the highest-paid person in any corporation should be compensated at no more than a fixed percentage of the lowest-paid employee. This sum should include all non-salary compensation as well: bonuses, stock-options, benefits and the like. That way, CEOs would be forced to pay everyone else in the organization before they paid themselves. I suggest a ratio of 10:1. Incentive would still exist for employees lower in the organizational structure to work hard
to advance, but honest work would still be awarded honest pay. All employees, furthermore, would have incentive to work hard, as their pay would be directly related to the company’s profits instead of squandered by the outrageous compensation packages now lavished on even the most incompetent executives. The corporate world is the only aspect of American life in which egalitarianism isn’t even countenanced. It amounts to corporate feudalism, and that is about as un-American as it gets.
Yes, this would mean that if a CEO wanted to earn $500,000 a year he’d have to pay his janitors $50,000. But if you do not think that the men and women who push brooms for a living deserve that much, you’ve obviously never done it for an extended period of time.
3. The health care and pharmaceutical industries should be heavily regulated, and, like utilities, their profits limited. Aside from water, our other utilities, such as electricity and natural gas, are far less important than health care, yet we regulate them in order to ensure their continued availability and keep their costs in check. Health care is something everyone will need at some point; it seems senseless to treat it any differently than those other industries that we deem too important to leave to the vagaries of the open market.
This scheme would not remove private industry from the creation of new drugs or medical techniques, nor from their delivery. It would merely force them to play by the public’s rules instead of those of greed and unbending service to the bottom line.
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