3 individual people possess enough wealth to build the machines that will get them into outer space. Not countries full of tax paying citizens, but individual people.
In my opinion, this is absolutely grotesque. The redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class up to the uber-rich is destroying our world.
The desire for individuals to earn more and more leaves very little for the rest. That is fact. When executives demand salaries, bonuses, stock options, etc... they're taking the very money away from the company that they work for that would go toward paying better employee salaries and affording benefits for their employees.
I'm not saying that any single individual should earn less than they are worth. What I'm saying is that those individuals should really take a step back and actually look at what they are worth and at what they actually need. Always taking into consideration the company that they work for.
Go for it if you can afford to purchase a $200,000 car, or a million dollar home. Just remember how many people you put in the poor house when you demanded all of that unnecessary money.
Consider McKesson. When I worked in the IT field for McKesson, The CEO was the highest paid CEO in America (maybe the world, I can't remember) earning $140 million dollars a year (at the time). I was called to a phone conference one day. All of us who were in the technology division were called to the conference call, which represented a few thousand employees. During that call, we were informed that over 1,000 employees in our division were being laid off that day. 1,000 people lost their jobs on that day, while the CEO was "earning" over 140 million dollars that year. Just think if his greed - and the rest of the executives at McKesson - would have subsided just enough to take a 10 million dollar a year pay cut, leaving him a paltry 130 million dollars that year. Consider how many of those 1,000 jobs could have been saved. Consider how much advertisement or research and development would have benefited if he had taken a 40 million dollar pay cut - to a measly 100 million that year... and how much that research and development would have improved the companies position in the technology market. But, instead, company money was spent to lobby congress into forcing the DEA to increase the number of opioid doses that McKesson could deliver to particular communities. The CEO was never concerned with the company he worked for, the employees that were employed by the company, and he was never concerned with the communities the company was ruining. He was never a company man, but a single greedy man who wanted more. And actually believed he was worth it. Meaning that the employees he screwed over were not, in his mind. I used this as a single example. Consider that there are literally thousands of executive types around the world who could care less about what their individual greed is doing to the companies that they work for, or the employees that they are affecting by taking so much away from their companies.
It's all a matter of perspective. How much does any single individual actually need? Certainly, we all need a basic minimum, and I'll agree that we all need to save and build a nest egg for lean times and for retirement, but we certainly don't need to have so much money that we begin fantasizing about being a self funded space agency.
= new reply since forum marked as read
