Secular Café: Disproportionate pay at the top

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Disproportionate pay at the top Apr 30th 2012, 00:22 I hardly ever agree on anything with Charles Moore, but... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...-struggle.html Quote: Now, says Ferdinand Mount, oligarchs are in charge of Britain. Even as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair claimed to advance "the many, not the few", the opposite was happening. The epigraph to Mount's book is the joke made, in 2008, about the credit crunch: "Never in the field of human commerce was so much paid by so many to so few." The level of reward for "top people" exposed by the crunch is one of the most unexpected features of modern times. What is even more astonishing is that it persists in the face of disaster. As this excellent book hits the streets, a serious shareholder revolt looms at Barclays, where the chief executive, Bob Diamond, is to receive a £17.7 million "compensation package". (That word "compensation", by the way, was a brilliant American invention, with its implication that paying huge sums to the rich is their due because of all that they have suffered. The word is never used of poor people's pay.)... ...When people who are neither immoral nor stupid are making errors so colossal that, collectively, they impoverish whole generations, something very weird is happening. Oligarchy brings this about because it cuts off the power of the wider society to arraign the people who are making the mistakes. Oligarchs, even well‑intentioned ones, cease to receive the information they need to detect their own error. The amber light of shareholder complaint becomes invisible. The "end to boom and bust" of which Gordon Brown boasted deluded them into forgetting about risk. Their enormous salaries and bonuses seemed to them evidence of success rather than storm cones. The article goes on to blame the undemocratic EU, but of course similar problems exist in America. IMO defective democracy needs an overhaul. With an essentially two-party system, politicians aren't really required to pay attention to the people.

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