Obviously the system we have is screwed. So instead of openeing up to shareholders then profitsharing plans is the way to go. Imagine an employee thats proud and has incentive to build the company and speak well of it to others....totall opposite of now!!
Obviously? No, not obviously. Like any system, it's not perfect, but the solution isn't to replace it with something even worse.
Why mandate how profits are to be divided to companies and people who start companies up? Who are you to tell me how my company should be structured and to interject yourself in the compensation negotiations between myself and my prospective employees?
If a company wishes to do profit sharing today, it can implement it trivially. Why do you seek to enforce it at the point of the proverbial gun? Why do you think that you are qualified to determine how other people should live their lives and conduct their business?
Speaking of greed. In 1960 the average CEO wage was 19 times his best paid employee. Now its 400 times!! Only thing that changed is the level of greed and the business owners are killing themselves by hoarding money into offshore accounts and foriegn currency. Its close to TREASON in my opinion.
I agree with you that many CEOs are ridiculously overpaid and horribly underperforming to boot (e.g. HP's former CEO Léo Apotheker). At its core, a supply and demand situation. People to perform menial labor are a dime a dozen. Executives capable of running large companies aren't.
Personally, I think that shareholders of corporations should lead open revolts against the board that authorize some of these ridiculous compensation packages, and boot the board members off. But, by and large, they don't. Plenty of reasons: large institutional investors don't mind the status quo as long as the bottom line is good; smaller investors don't care to vote when they get proxies, and so on.
As for the offshore situation, it's certainly a bad situation but many companies are, sadly, stuck between a rock and a hard place. The fact is that the cost of doing business in the United States is ridiculous compared to the cost of doing business overseas. Between compliance with various rules and regulations bought and paid for by lobbyists and rules and regulations negotiated in the back rooms of Capitol Hill as part of a quid-pro-quo, and frivolous lawsuits by disgruntled employees, advocacy groups, class action shysters, and with the Party in China controlling their currency to put pressure on everyone else... Can you really blame them for going far, far away?
I'm not excusing them, do don't misunderstand. I readily avree that some companies are going to pursue the bottom line no matter what. Thats fine - companies are in business to make money. But that is half the story - the other half is what I described above.
I think that Congress should provide incentives for companies to do business in the U.S. and to repatriate their off-shore operations as much as is reasonable.