Vatican Storing Wealth for Themselves?

[dochawk]

There isn’t anywhere where it is worse to be desperate and vulnerable than in a place that has “warring factions.”

More specifically, in every country with starvation, there is enough food–but either garment or rebels are preventing it from getting it to those who need it.

hawk

 

[PetraG]

Also, it depends on the CEO. The head of Johnson and Johnson when they had that cyanide issue… worth every penny he got paid for his response.

That response was not just window-dressing to make the brand look good. They made real changes to improve customer safety.

From what I have been told, the best thing Johnson & Johnson is doing is being a leader among global corporation in ensuring that even their vendors and suppliers meet their human rights and workers’ rights standards.

That doesn’t mean their CEO ought to feel entitled to take as much money as he can get, but if the top brass really are looking out for people first and letting the integrity of the brand carry the business, then yes of course it is OK for them to have a higher salary than people who didn’t do the work to gain that kind of expertise and do not carry the burden of that kind of responsibility.

It isn’t that no one ought to make more than anyone else. It is that people ought to come before profits and companies ought to have a business model that gives everyone who does business with them or works for them a sustainable wage. If you invest your savings with a company like that, you are not just seeing to your own future but doing good with your worldly possessions.

The Church has been very clear that the owners of capital do hold it for themselves and have the right to earn a profit from it. This is why the Popes and their social pronouncements upset both the communists and the social-Darwinist capitalists.

 

[MonteRCMS]

That is the power of capitalism. If you try and screw the customer, the market always strikes back.

We don’t solve the world’s poverty problems by redistributing existing wealth but by helping people participate in creating new wealth.

That’s how it works.

By making more … rather than taking from others.

 

[MonteRCMS]

Read the encyclical: Centesimus Annus by Pope St. John Paul II.

http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-p...s/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html

 

[goout]

If you can’t support children, keep it zipped. Is that not the principle of NFP? Or, is it better to spawn broods that you have no hope whatsoever of ever being able to support>

Again the assertion that the solution to human problems is less humanity.
Does that really make sense?

 

[MonteRCMS]

But for people who are already not paying taxes (the poor), how do you cut their taxes below zero. That’s one of the things that seems rather dishonest about the talking point “not enough tax cuts for the poor”–they’re already at a negative (i.e. getting refundable tax credits without having had tax liability in the first place). And “middle class” is so nebulous when it gets bandied about in political discussions that I’m not sure where that begins/ends. I make more than federal poverty level for the family size, does that make me middle class? If so, I’m still not paying taxes and getting refunds beyond what I paid in (child tax credits).

On the other hand, the tax cuts were directly responsible for my son’s employer (Walmart) to increase his hourly rate by a dollar (which might not seem like a lot, but is a gross of over $2k per year as a raise).

Getting more education is the key.

“For the best return on your money, pour your purse into your head.”

― Benjamin Franklin

 

[MonteRCMS]

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/benjamin_franklin

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Benjamin Franklin

 

[MonteRCMS]

Top CEOs make abouot 300 times what the average worker makes. Are you saying they deserve to be paid 300 times as much? CEO pay is six times that of the top 0.1% of earners, so this is not a “talent” thing, either.

Not 300% more. Three hundered times as much. I think the figure was $53,200 compared to $16.3 million. A year. There is no greed involved in that? Is that money really deserved based on all the sacrifices these people make? On the financial risk they are taking, such as entrepreneurs make?

If you say, “oh, well, the companies are so big, spreading some of that excessive pay out to pay the workers more wouldn’t make a difference,” I’d say, “I’ll bet those who got it would not say so.”

When they stop being worth that much, they will get fired.

They earn their salaries by making good decisions.

People who are able to make good decisions are difficult to find.

If they are not rewarded, they will go elsewhere.

And to find people who CONSISTENTLY make good decisions is rare indeed.

 

[MonteRCMS]

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/benjamin_franklin

 

[PetraG]

There is evidence that they make that much because their salaries are decided essentially by a crony system, rather than by such super-human merit. It is hard to argue that all these companies would fold up if they didn’t have a wage system in which the lowest-paid live hand-to-mouth while those at the top make hundreds of times more. The most lucrative business model is not automatically the most ethical business model.

Having said that, these CEOs are not clerics, some are not even Christian, and so they are a bit off-topic. It should not be any surprise when the secular world runs on the pursuit of wealth at the expense of essentially everything except that which ultimately preserves wealth and the ability to amass more of it. Since there is a right to own private property, that temptation cannot be ethically eliminated. Like other freedoms, this brings societal challenges, but it beats the alternative.

 

[MonteRCMS]

They get paid based on their performance.

 

[PetraG]

They get paid based on their performance.

Do they see to it that others without so much (name removed by moderator)ut on their own pay are compensated fairly, too? Or is it a case where they make money for stockholders who own the capital part of the business (and have power over how much money they make personally) while paying the workers only as much as necessary to keep the turnover low enough to keep from costing the company money?

Do you see what I am getting at? They are paid for enriching stockholders, whose interests are paramount. If the stockholders and CEOs only care about their own enrichment, there is no guarantee that anyone low on the ladder gets paid what their performance is worth, rather than what they demand.

The CEO and the board of directors have the power. If the CEO and the board of directors don’t concern themselves with fairness, the company could be both lucrative and manifestly unjust in its compensation policies. There is no economic law that prevents that. Only ethics prevent oppressive labor practices. When ethics fail, well, there are unions, but that can turn out to be the same problem but imposed with different kinds of self-interest. In the best case, workers do not need a union because their employers take pains to be fair on their behalf in the first place.

But we digress from the topic…

 

[dochawk]

I’ve been trying not to jump in, but now I’m failing.

For background, I’m a lawyer and displaced Economics professor.

The best example in both directions may come from Eisner at Disney.

In the first, there was mass outrage at his $50M payday, or whatever it was. Folks were screaming high and low. Conspicuously missing from this choir were the Disney shareholders–they were all out dancing in the streets.

Eisner took over a failing Disney. As part of his package, he got a pile of stock options to buy at $4–which would mean the stock would have to climb under his reign. If it didn’t get to $4, they would be worthless.

He sold at $20.

His next contract was very wrong in the other direction–his option had hard to miss strike prices; all he had to do was not destroy the company for a huge payoff.

The rise of stock options was actually a significant reform. Prior to their prevalence, executives were paid the same no matter how the company performed. Options were designed to align the interests of the executives with the shareholders.

They worked fairly well, but created a new problem: once the price went down, the execs had a spectacular incentive to swing for the bleachers–they had nothing more to lose if the stock tanked further by their risks.

My proposed solution is to require the majority of high executive compensation to be outright grants of stock. They would take it at a $0 basis (so as not to pay taxes the year issued; they wouldn’t have any pay left to live on otherwise) and pay taxes when sold. They would not be allowed to sell for a period of years. Now, rather than the one-way incentive, they’re aligned both ways.

hawk

 

[Seeksadvice]

Yes, yes it does. It works in other animals

 

[goout]

Yes, yes it does. It works in other animals

Maybe you don’t intend it you are aligned with some barabaric history here.
Human beings are not animals. Humanity is a blessing not a curse. We help each other thrive.

 

[Seeksadvice]

Humans are just as capable of over populating as anything else. Does not NFP say that if this is a bad time for more kids, you don’t have sex when your wife is fertile? Seriously, it’s what the Church teaches as family planning. Failing to plan is bad.

I don’t get why humans should be exempt from common sense in your eyes.

 

[goout]

Humans are just as capable of over populating as anything else. Does not NFP say that if this is a bad time for more kids, you don’t have sex when your wife is fertile? Seriously, it’s what the Church teaches as family planning. Failing to plan is bad.

I don’t get why humans should be exempt from common sense in your eyes.

Common sense is that people help one another. It is good to be alive, and the child born into desperate poverty might be the next Beethoven, or might find the cure to cancer, or might marry your son or daughter.
It’s funny how common sense goes out the window in the face of fear and self-centered-ness.

You propose the solution to human problems is less humanity. That is simply wrong. That is Margaret Sanger’s and Adolph Hitler’s solution to problems.
The purpose of NFP isn’t to solve human problems by avoiding people. NFP is for the prudent planning of families. The philosophy and intent behind it is different than negating humanity, who in your words “breed like rabbits”.

The whole of the world’s population can fit into the state of Texas. Think about that the next time a false sense of deprivation frightens you.

 

[PetraG]

I think that CEOs, like entertainers and sports stars, are paid based on what the market will bear. They’re entitled to make what they can, especially those people who provide diversions that no one needs and no one has to buy. Arguably, people who are paid entirely out of the discretionary funds of their customers are not in a position of enriching themselves and their stockholders by pricing life’s necessities at levels that their own employees can’t afford to buy–and sorry, but no one’s child actually needs a Cinderella princess dress. (And yes, I remember Henry Ford’s opinion that a company is limiting its profitability horizon if it makes things that its own employees can’t afford.)

The problem comes when leaders of a business venture–the owners and the controllers of the capital end of the arrangement–become successful under a business model that pays their employees a wage that won’t support themselves and children. If an organization is set up so that the CEO’s only incentive is to give investors the highest return possible, then depending on the nature of the business and how in-demand the needed employees are, that can become an incentive to shortchange the employee. Even if the company is selling things the customer doesn’t need, it still needs to have a business model that gives a fair wage to employees. The “if it weren’t for us they’d starve altogether” defense is not going to hold water in the end. Scrooge was not the founder of a “feast” at the Cratchit house on Christmas.

In the case of the Vatican or the Church, building cathedrals that everyone from the highest to the lowest can call their own is fine, safeguarding gifts of sacred art to the Church is fine, holding property for uses necessarsy for the faithful is fine, and spending the money so that articles used at the altar are made of noble materials is fine, but not expenditures made under a defacto business model in which contributions are solicited and spent not for the common good and the advancement of the Gospel but in order to raise the standard of living of the clergy (or perhaps the employees of the church) to a level that takes money away from the work of the Gospel.

Of course, now the Vatican has holdings that were accepted or purchased when the Popes and bishops literally were secular princes as well as princes of the Church. The Church owns things that are historically important and unquestionably durable that would probably not be replaced in kind if the need arose today. Other things were perhaps given as gifts to be held in trust, not as wealth to be sold and were accepted with that understanding. Some things may belong to the patrimony of Italy and of the city of Rome as much as to the Church, and could be held in trust for that reason; I have no idea. The main thing is that the Church generally has positive reasons of guardianship for not selling the treasures that are criticized. Things that are actually just self-indulgences, well, I think the modern Popes have been weeding those down even before Pope Francis was elected.

 

[dochawk]

If an organization is set up so that the CEO’s only incentive is to give investors the highest return possible, then depending on the nature of the business and how in-demand the needed employees are, that can become an incentive to shortchange the employee.

An incentive, yes.

A means is another question.

Barring monopsony (sole purchaser) hiring power, and barring a monopoly or cartel in the product being manufactured, if the company were “taking advantage” of employees–perhaps by paying $12 when the value added by the last of that type of employee is $20–it would have an incredibly strong incentive to hire more employees. In fact, it would keep doing so until it started driving up the wage and/or driving down the price, until the wage and price are roughly the same.

Simple greed is enough to get there; there is no altruism involved at all.

Shifting issues, if we were to change the focus of a company–perhaps XYZCorp decides to focus on the environment instead of shareholder return–these “good” companies would not get capital; it would go to "bad"companies with higher returns. Would you really take a 4% return on your retirement funds to buy the “good” company when 7% was available with the same risk?

It would require a change in law to shift the focus. The resulting companies would be significantly less profitable, and would be constantly in court over whether they properly allocated their focus.

hawk

 

[PetraG]

Simple greed is enough to get there; there is no altruism involved at all.

Enough to ensure that workers make a living wage? Hmm. So what was the whole union movement about? The working conditions were great and the workers were just getting greedy? Is that your reading?

…if we were to change the focus of a company–perhaps XYZCorp decides to focus on the environment instead of shareholder return–these “good” companies would not get capital…

Except when there are investors who invest based on whether or not their wealth is being increased in a way that complies with their conscience. (“Conscience” mutual funds are becoming more popular, actually.)

It would require a change in law to shift the focus.

A change of heart would not work?