Maximum Wages - Defeat Sociopathy that ruins Capitalism

Capitalism survived because it works better than every other system.  But what we are seeing now is the less fettered capitalists are, the less they use the system for society's benefit and the more they appeal to their own baser needs.

The whole point of capitalism is it accepts that people are both greedy and lazy - to greater or lesser degrees.  We get people to get out of bed by working for a living and contributing at the blue collar levels.  Basic survival and trying to make a better life for their kids. All workers work for a few dollars more.

Everyone's involvement in capitalism comes down to how lazy and how greedy they are.

Unfortunately, at the highest wealth levels, people are prone to take total advantage of the system they now own by taking full advantage of all the perks.  They play dirty to win a few billion more.


Society owns capitalism, not the wealthy. The social contract is we all agreed to play by the rules in everyone's favour.


When you combine extreme wealth with sociopathy that's not in everyone's best interest. 

How do you combat that?  Make a maximum wage. Or increase taxes over that limit on an exponential scale.

If we cap total income per year at say $10 million dollars then we reduce the incentive to be a sociopathic wealthy person. 

If you can't make any more, then you don't have the incentive to go to extreme measures to make more.  You can be more lazy and less greedy. 

Laws can fix capitalism.  If we invoked a global maximum wage we would solve captialisms ills more than any bailout or legal proceeding.

Estate taxes equalize economic starting points

Think of it this way, if you wanted to make sure that rich kids never contribute to society, then allow them to keep all their parents` money.

Without a way to reset wealth, not grab taxes, society would spiral into the very few rich people and the very many poor people.

Money, or wealthier people call it equity, is a tool of society.  It is not a personal tool.  It rewards work, or it used to.  It was never meant as a cudgel to keep people down by the few that can buy everything else. More money equals more help, more lawyers, more lobbyists, more means to keep power without personal risk. It makes it harder to compete when the playing field is not close to fair.  What is fair, no idea, it`s a four letter word for a reason.  Fair isn`t making one side risk everything while the other side risks a margin of their bottom line. 


At the same time, like competitiveness with businesses and industry, there is no way to make inroads to novel ideas, novel products, more efficient and less expensive ways if your opponent can simply reach into the family war chest and spend your company into the ground. 

Look at all the ideas that we couldn`t get because existing companies neutralized better ideas with anti-competitive practices!  Society gets better when we get more efficient, more productive, easier, and safer.  Less is wasted when society and our technologies improve. One way to avoid stagnant legacies is to stop family legacies from holding society back. 

Corporate Punishment: Mandatory 5 Year Jail Term for Managers that ignore Safety Defect warnings

There are few things more dangerous than a loaded gun.  A copper jacketed round packed with gunpowder and fired from a weapon can make a large hole in anything.  The damage to a human being is irreversible, healable maybe.

But, when you look at society as a whole,  the damage caused by careless, apathetic, or neutralized workers (whose job it is to protect the public from  products) overwhelms all loss from warfare.

To put things in perspective, the US lost 4,282 killed in all of the Iraq War 2 including during the insurgency for the period March 2003 until December 2009.  That's 6 years.

In 2012, 33,561 Americans died in auto accidents. In one year.

So who does more damage to society, a lone soldier with a rifle or a manager at a car company that ignores defect warnings from subordinates?

When I read that, in the case of GM, according to GM's culture of ignoring safety problems

GM manager Bill McAleer told host Michael Smerconish that employees who work at GM were "faced with a culture where you get fired if you do talk about quality and safety issues, and you get fired if you don't talk about them."

It is obvious that the risks and rewards for good and bad behaviour are not being learned at car companies.  Imagine you are an engineer. You know there is a problem.  If you complain or cause an issue then the manager looks bad.  If the manager looks bad, they take it out on you.  If you don't speak up, people die.  If you speak up, people will probably still die, but you'll be out of a job and have no way to help the process. See the dilemma from a worker's perspective?  If you keep your job maybe there is a way to get it done. If you make waves, there is no way.

Let me give you a personal engineering example.  When I first got to DRDC from my old job at General Dynamics, I grew bored with the slow motion and the inability to make a difference. I was offered a job at Wittke (then owned by Federal Signal) as a senior electrical engineer so I took a leave of absence and tried my luck back outside in the corporate world.

Now, I was learning the job, learning the designs, and learning the customers.  There was a lot of listening.  And reading. One client (Waste Management Inc.) had an unscrupulous business manager that would take ideas from one company and ask others to make him the same product. Or he would work on his ideal garbage truck design. He was not an engineer, but thought he knew better.  He wanted his trucks to have strobe light flashers so that it would make them very prominent so it would - to his mind increase safety.  This seemed a logical theory.

I had just come from robotics and land mine detection, I knew that I didn't know what I was supposed to know. That is the humility expected of an engineer - not a manager. I was new to the law regarding lighting on trucks.  So I read the laws in the US and Canada.  The Canadian one was mainly a copy of the US one.  All good there.  It did not preclude it at that time.  Ok, good so far.

I talked to our lights suppliers and it seemed we could get them in.  The design was simple enough. Still good.

I didn't know much about strobes, but I knew that perhaps there was a link to epileptic episodes.  My high school friend had suffered from seizures so I was aware how instantly a person could become incapacitated.  I did a little research online and read some resources and found that the frequency range for epileptic seizures is the SAME as for these designed strobe lights.  The strobe could be slowed down, but then it wouldn't be a strobe, would it?

I brought this to the attention of my boss, who at that time was an American engineer. I relayed my concerns about strobes and garbage trucks, that while it might work most times if someone with epileptic seizures - perhaps didn't even know that they had epilepsy - was to view that strobing light from near enough it might cause a violent incapacitating seizure, that person may fall down in front of or worse behind a rolling truck and be killed.  This makes using a strobe a defect of design, it is not inherently safe. I made sure to put my concerns in writing, in an email, to WMI.

Bottom line, I refused to design it.  My boss backed me up. And then the LED light company got back to me with their concerns - after doing a little research of their own and voiced their issue with this design choice. There are lots of checks and balances in the tech world looking out for society.

The manager at WMI was furious, apparently, as I wasn't party to that conversation.  How dare an engineer question him.

Well, thoughtless self-absorbed mangers, that is why you hire engineers and not trained monkeys to keep your designs safe.

And how dare I put it in writing. Now he was trapped. Now what happens when he tries this with another company - that is what he was thinking, not that the issue was serious.

Do you see how managers avoid personal responsibility if they can make it a case of he said, she said?  That is why engineers should always put something important in writing.

Do you see why well meaning engineers can be forced to do the work or lose their job? WMI bought a lot of trucks from my company, this could be a factory closing decision.  Who wants to deal with that? Remember, the engineers do not have ultimate authority we work for the managers that do. We don't get to make the decision.


It turns out that this manager tried other companies to design it for him and they also had problems.  The project was eventually scrapped I'm told because of other issues this guy made with expensive design choices that were largely his making. In the end, a lawsuit would have cost more than the cost of ten trucks.

The issue of safety is really what an engineer "adds value" to a company - by saving a lawsuit that costs more than the incremental improvement of a risky design choice.

 I left the company for other reasons, like they were running it into the ground.

I had the balls to stand up to a customer because I was trained in the Army so I'm not shy and I'm not going to kill anyone through apathy or willful blindness. That is what society expects.  But it is not fun and not to be done lightly. And let's be honest, I also had an out I could go back to my other job.  I could afford to make a stand.

Most people don't have that luxury.  And that is why we need to help them to make us safe. If the law is on our side, there is no where a manager can hide, no where they can blame subordinates.

If a manager were to aim a loaded gun and kill an employee, he or she would be prosecuted under criminal law for the harm caused.  But if a manager hides a defect that same manager could kill tens if not hundreds or thousands of people with no personal liability.  That should change, and soon.

So, based on my own experience, I recommend we encourage lawmakers to write laws that impose mandatory 5 year jail terms on managers that do not heed safety warnings from engineers or other technical people. No legal outs, if you are a manager you should have public safety as a top priority.  If managers do not have the public's safety at heart then we must adjust their cost-benefit analysis to the point where it is in THEIR best interest to be as safe as possible.