Fragile principle or oxymoron?

Michel Rocard, a former Prime Minister of France, takes the issue on with some insight and lucidity (by American standards, at least, considering these are not the types of questions usually discussed on the evening cable talk shows. Hmmm, wonder why?)

Henry Ford, builder of the American automobile (1863-1947), was not only the world’s biggest industrialist for fifteen years. He was also one of the saviors of the capitalism that had been severely struck by the 1929 crisis: He invented the policy of high salaries that assured consumption’s comeback. That indicates the importance of his intuitions.

On various occasions, he asserted that capitalism could not live and develop without respecting a rigorous ethic. In his opinion, it was bad - morally - for the head of a company to pay himself more than 40 times his employees’ average salary. He followed this rule himself. The key to this conclusion maintains that capitalism is assuredly the form of social organization that guarantees the greatest margin of freedom to all actors in the system. That observation obviously does not hold in the absence of a high degree of self-limitation and self-control.

Now it is clear, as this twenty-first century begins, that something has cracked somewhere in the system.

It sure has. And all of it is ‘perfectly legal.’

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