Diamond-Cut Life

Given that Diamond-Cut Life is about more joy and less consumption, I’m not surprising anyone when I state my satisfaction at President Obama’s capping of executive pay. Of course, the limit only applies to companies getting government bailout money, and the cap of $500,000 seems like a sky-high ceiling to me and I imagine to the rest of the normally-salaried United States. The bigger point to me is how far our culture has let things go before even starting to set some financial boundaries.

As Timothy Egan points out, the gap between executive pay and average worker pay has increased almost tenfold in the U.S. in the last 30 years. The discrepancy is much smaller in the European Union, where medical care is a human right available to everyone. I see the folks across the water as practicing more common sense than we do.

We as citizens have a lot of culpability in passively watching, for decades, compensation levels run amok, not just to business executives but professional athletes and entertainment celebrities. There’s been no sensible correlation between what they’re contributing to society and what they’re earning. It’s been greed-based, not grounded in reality or true meritocracy; it’s been a decades-long money drunk. And the over-consumption that the over-compensation feeds into is ruinous — a killing force — to the planet that belongs to all of us.

President Obama’s boundary-setting is a tiny step toward the killing of making a killing. And I like it.

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