Fine, then don't call them salary caps if Forbes, Draper, & Co. keep squealing and whining. Call them 20x Rational Restraint Ratios that ensure all stakeholders and VALUE CREATORS participate proportionately in the returns earned by their Shared Fate labors while simultaneously Richly Rewarding innovation, investment, and market savvy.
Why are such ratios essential? Regular readers already know the answer to that question, but we'll add here that primarily, ratios -- in addition to a whole suite of interrelated policies -- help to assure that that the economic circulatory system continues to operate in a sustainable manner. Cash clots kill and economy, just as surely as blood clots kill a body. Moreover, it is also physically, mathematically, existentially impossible for any individual human's contribution to the race to be worth billions or trillions of times more than any other human being. It's empirically impossible. We each only have 24 hours in a day and none of us is AGI-Posthuman-Enhanced just yet. Even then, it will ethically impossible in the land where it continues to be asserted that All Are Created Equal, with Certain Inalienable Rights, including Liberty and Justice for All.
Let's also briefly address the entitlement issue one more time. These economic blood clots do not have a "right" to exist. Nor do pathological hoarders have a "right" to indulge their mental illness, just because it's intertwined with cash. In fact, that entanglement makes their mental illness even more damaging to society.
Compulsive hoarding is a DSM-IV illness . Maybe it is genetic, and that might partly explain why insane levels of wholly unsustainable skews of untold wealth run in genetic lines. Mental illness attached to money is still mental illness. Literally, there are just a few thousand very sick compulsively hoarding human beings acting as blood clots within the flailing American economy. Just because the object of their hoarding can be hidden away in offshore accounts, doesn't make it any less hoarding. Just because everyone understands the value of cash, that doesn't mean that the Marginal Psychological Value of cash doesn't encounter an inflection point somewhere in the $100M range.
Everyone knows that there is a point at which the slips of paper lose ALL MEANINGFUL VALUE and the game devolves into a seventh grade playground pissing contest. Even the skewed-up hoarders themselves acknowledge this: watch, listen, and learn.
So go ahead, try to explain to me a Healthy Human Psychological Profile that NEEDS more than $100M in Personal Assets while neighbors are Giving Away Their Children just to survive. Healthy human beings consider the health of the village within which they were enabled to acquire so much. Of course they OWE the community; because without the community, there would be no context within which to play out this compulsive cash hoarding illness.
This unsustainable, skewed wealth hoarding is just psychologically sick and morally revolting. We've said that this is going to get personal and as unemployment rates continue to grow, the demands to Publish The List of the top 1000 most fiscally sick and sadistic are only going to grow.
Bottom line: Ayn Rand and Aldous Huxley were both wrong. The road to postscarcity is not an avenue that Parades Satanic Sloth, escorted by a Panoptic Police State; it is a road toward the fulfillment of the penultimate Promise and Triumph of Industrial Capitalism.
So let us not lament that something is lost. Celebrate instead the success of human ingenuity and perseverance that has brought us so far. WE DID IT! Huzzah! Freedom from Want and Poverty can be ours through new ways of participation and inclusion on the human stage. No caps, no limits to the potentials for humanity.
