Salaries

My husband and I have had a "disagreement" about salaries for a long time. I have been the one, admittedly, whining that some people make too much money. My pet peeves were celebrities and athletes. I said they didn't do anything that great to warrant the millions of dollars being thrown at them. The former, for the most part, were glorified story tellers. Worse yet, they weren't even the ones writing the stories. They were just giving voice to someone else's idea. The latter were being applauded for basically playing a game. If the game at least resembled something useful in the real world, like the gladiator games did, then I could see some justification. But to me, their value was no greater than my husband's bicep's value if he was too tired from his workout to put out the trash. Impressive to look at but I wouldn't pay a lot for them.


My husband maintains that people are paid what the market will bear. Both celebrities and athletes are more like tools for the companies they work for. If they are popular, they bring in more revenue and therefore can ask a higher price. And as long as fans are willing to pack the ball park and movie theater, their salaries should remain high. Hence - what the market will bear. I was just going to have to wait until people started agreeing with me and stopped going to see films and games before those salaries would come down.


He recently defended the AIG executive salaries saying they are the ones taking all the risk and therefore should be paid for that. And at first I agreed with him, especially since my own 401K benefitted greatly from the risks of Wall Street investment firms which, through their trading and fund management, increased my accounts's value. But then I had to ask, what risk did they really have? It wasn't their money they were working with, it was yours and mine. Their only real risk was losing their job and don't we all have that risk. In terms of effort or time, there are plenty of people who work physically harder or longer hours and are not paid as much. In terms of intelligence, there are plenty of scientists out there who are at least equally smart in their own field who don't get paid nearly what those top execs did.


In terms of importance you could say that what they did was incredibly important. It kept the world's largest economy going. But couldn't you say that the basic researchers who develop the flu vaccine every year, thereby preventing tens of thousands of deaths are even more important. And talk about risk. If they get it wrong you don't just lose money, you lose life.


So you probably think I'm one of those people who think the AIG execs shouldn't get those large salaries. But I'm not. I'd rather live in a world where you are free to set up your own system, be it a company or an economic entity like banking, and make as much money as you can because you thought of the idea, than in one where some external power tells you what you can't do, what is the most you can make and how you are to spend what you do make. If the world was perfect, people wouldn't be super greedy. Or if they did make a lot of money they would use a decent portion of it to better their local community. But I will accept those things not happening as a cost of being free to pursue your dreams.