|
Townhall...
Pitting
Us Against Each Other
By Walter E. Williams
Oct 19, 2011
President
Barack Obama and the
Democratic Party have led increasingly successful efforts to pit
Americans
against one another through the politics of hate and envy. Attacking
CEO
salaries, the president -- last year during his Midwest tour -- said,
“I do
think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
Let’s
look at CEO salaries, but before
doing so, let’s look at other salary disparities between those at the
bottom
and those at the top. According to Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list for 2010,
Oprah
Winfrey earned $290 million. Even if her makeup person or cameraman
earned
$100,000, she earned thousands of times more than that. Is that fair?
Among
other celebrities earning hundreds or thousands of times more than the
people
who work with them are Tyler Perry ($130 million), Jerry Bruckheimer
($113
million), Lady Gaga ($90 million) and Howard Stern ($76 million).
According to
Forbes, the top 10 celebrities, excluding athletes, earned an average
salary of
a little more than $100 million in 2010.
According
to The Wall Street Journal
Survey of CEO Compensation (November 2010), Gregory Maffei, CEO of
Liberty
Media, earned $87 million, Oracle’s Lawrence Ellison ($68 million) and
rounding
out the top 10 CEOs was McKesson’s John Hammergren, earning $24
million. It
turns out that the top 10 CEOs have an average salary of $43 million,
which
pales in comparison with America’s top 10 celebrities, who earn an
average salary
of $100 million.
When
you recognize that celebrities
earn salaries that are some multiples of CEO salaries, you have to ask:
Why is
it that rich CEOs are demonized and not celebrities? A clue might be
found if
you asked: Who’s doing the demonizing? It turns out that the demonizing
is led
by politicians and leftists with the help of the news media, and like
sheep,
the public often goes along. Why demonize CEOs? My colleague Dr. Thomas
Sowell
explained it in his brand-new book, “The Thomas Sowell Reader.” One of
his
readings, titled “Ivan and Boris -- and Us,” starts off with a fable of
two
poor Russian peasants. Ivan finds a magic lamp and rubs it, and the
jinni
grants him one wish. As it turns out, Boris has a goat, but Ivan
doesn’t.
Ivan’s wish is for Boris’ goat to die. That vision reflects the
feelings of too
many Americans. If all CEOs worked for nothing, it would mean
absolutely little
or nothing to the average American’s bottom line.
For
politicians, it’s another story:
Demonize people whose power you want to usurp. That’s the typical way
totalitarians gain power. They give the masses someone to hate. In
18th-century
France, it was Maximilien Robespierre’s promoting hatred of the
aristocracy
that was the key to his acquiring more dictatorial power than the
aristocracy
had ever had. In the 20th century, the communists gained power by
promoting
public hatred of the czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler
gained
power by promoting hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks. In each case, the
power
gained led to greater misery and bloodshed than anything the old regime
could
have done.
Let
me be clear: I’m not equating
America’s liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin and Hitler. I am
saying that
promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for
politicians and
their liberal followers to control and micromanage businesses. It’s not
about
the amount of money people earn. If it were, politicians and leftists
would be
promoting jealousy, fear and hate toward multimillionaire Hollywood and
celebrities and sports stars, such as LeBron James ($48 million), Tiger
Woods
($75 million) and Peyton Manning ($38 million). But there is no way
that
politicians could take over the roles of Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and
LeBron
James. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want
and it
matters not one iota politically.
The
Occupy Wall Street crowd shouldn’t
focus its anger at wealthy CEOs. A far more appropriate target would be
the
U.S. Congress.
Read
this and other columns at
Townhall
|
