Paying them something to make them go away is one thing but it’s really going to far lately.

As a CEO I appreciate the essential job the leader of a company provides. It is a RARE talent and art to navigate a company through intense competition and market changes and to protect it from failure.

President Bush is the CEO of the USA and we can see the extreme damage that can be done by poor judgment. Wouldn’t many people support paying him a hundred million dollars to just go away?

The problem I have with Ellen Goodman’s approach is that the “politics of envy” just try to create class anger instead of coming at it from a problem-solving approach.

Then again, her job is to be an instigator, not a policymaker. It’s just important to remind people not to take apples-and-potatoes comparisons from op-ed pages at face value.

I think the point is that all the risk is in the lower levels of the economy. If a CEO of a large company loses his job nowadays his severance package leaves him a multi-millionaire not counting what he received as salary and benefits while still employed. Many members of the lower economic classes don’t even get a severance package anymore.

We needn’t kill the Golden Goose, but we should do much more to insulate average Americans against the most disruptive consequences of an increasingly volatile system.

That I can agree with. I just reject the radical critiques of capitalism/globalization as being fundamentally non-responsive on the point of an alternative.

Globalization and market capitalism are producing great wealth, and that’s a very good thing. But in addition to the accelerating income inequalities the system currently produces, accelerating personal insecurity is probably more threatening to most Americans.

An increasingly volatile global economy places average Americans at increasing risk of losing their jobs and their pensions and their health insurance. These potentially catastrophic events lurk all to near for many families. People rightly see themselves as vulnerable to forces beyond their effective control. We needn’t kill the Golden Goose, but we should do much more to insulate average Americans against the most disruptive consequences of an increasingly volatile system.

One thing about the end of the middle class jobs for relatively unskilled labor means is that if you must change careers it takes longer to acquire those skills than current unemployment benefits help people make it through. Will a new system of some kind be necessary that can help people avoid losing their homes while they spend one or two years in retraining? I don’t see those questions being addressed by those who have faith in the existing system.