Thanks for responding. First, let me again stress that I believe the second commandment requires us to share every good thing, and to work for the benefit of our neighbor.

That said, I was disappointed that your advocacy of an egalitarian pay structure completely ducked the economic fundamentals, especially supply and demand. Interlocking directorates are only a small factor in setting high CEO salaries.

Ben & Jerry’s was acquired by Unilever (Holland) in 2000, after years of flat sales. Paying their CEO less than the average starting salary for a top-school MBA grad ensured their CEOs viewed the position as a resume-building internship and a stepping stone to better opportunities — replacing the CEO every 18 months proved to be a bad management strategy. Now they’re overseen by the suits at Unilever.

All of the big companies that used “egalitarian” structures (B&J, Whole Foods, Herman Miller) excluded stock options from their calculation, and I don’t know of any company that had egalitarian pay in the 90s that still has it today. In every case they abandoned it because they couldn’t attract or retain top talent. The pesky law of supply and demand raises its head once more.

It’s unfortunate, but true, that many more people are willing to pay lots more money to watch Alex Rodriguez play baseball than they are to watch me play baseball. A lot more people want to hear Billy Joel sing than to hear me sing. Any argument for egalitarian pay has to address talent scarcity and demand disparity.

The answer, I believe, is not to force Zion-building to ignore supply and demand, but to focus on consumption. I see no moral problem in J. K. Rowling’s selling a billion books. The moral issues arise from her choices of using that money. Many of those issues reduce to — for the benefit of my neighbor, or for myself? That’s where we should be focusing our efforts — educating the public, especially Mormons, about their moral obligation to use their resources to bless others, not themselves.

“What arrogant sounding, high minded statement.”

If I wrote it Joe, you can be assured it’s arrogant. It does happen to be true, however, that I’ve had this conversation with maybe 50 Mormons, and have noticed the mental gymnastics we all play when we realize that we know Christ is starving (whether in Africa or our backyard) while we’re choosing to comfortably play on an expensive computer.

Although Mother Teresa, she didn’t pay her tithing or join the church or have a recommend and I bet you 10,000 dollars she’s up there having a lemonade with God right now.

First of all, on the issue of CEO compensation, their pay is generally NOT a reflection of the marketplace. It is largely sheer greed and manipulation, which seems to contradict gospel temporal teachings about the world “lying in sin†because of such inequality (D&C 49:20). I am not advocating government control of compensation, on the other hand. But can CEO pay be controlled? Sure! What it would require is change. Some naively assume that boards of directors determine CEO compensation. But the reality is that most boards are made up of CEO friends in quid pro quo relationships. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.†“You put me on your board, and I’ll put you on mine.†“You propose a big raise as one of my board members, and I’ll argue for giving you a raise in your company.†I’ve been on corporate boards I have served on from California to the East Coast, and know what goes on. This is a huge and well-documented reality for most large U.S. companies.

The myth is that board members are independent, arms-length participants granting CEO compensation based on objective, third party decisions. The sad fact is that there is much research on interlocking boards which suggests just the opposite, that many board members are in fact hand picked by top executives to get their way. It’s a huge problem in the United States, and maybe the federal government ought to be the solution. All the backdatings of executive stock options in recent years has clearly given rise to new corporate reporting requirements which makes such corruption more difficult. But there are several other models for dealing with this problem.

In Japan, CEOs make a lot less money because of Japanese cultural values which emphasize equality. In Europe they have another powerful solution, that of co-determination. In the European model, workers and unions hold important seats on corporate boards of directors. They have access to the books. They know how much workers are being paid, and they push for more moderate compensation packages for CEOs because of this transparency. Thus, even their companies are as large and complicated as ours, American CEOs receive 4 times that of Swedish executives, 3.1 times more than Japanese counterparts, and 2.4 times the French. This is not due to some magical factor of the free market, but because of human norms and values. Of course, this completely contradicts the reality that American managers are losing their shirts as foreign firms grab our markets, exploit our inefficiencies, and mismanage our economy. The dollar’s down compared to the Euro, the pound, and is now down to being on par with the lowly Canadian dollar. Who’d a thunk it? While our guys focus on maximizing their personal bank accounts, global CEOs zero in on excellence.

I should mention that some U.S. executives have figured out what values are most appropriate for our age. In a number of American firms, enlightened CEOs have taken the initiative themselves to create a more equitable system. For example, Ben Cohen, founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, determined from day one that top executives should not receive more than 3:1 the compensation of lowest paid workers. After many years, they moved it to up to 7:1; but still that is roughly an egalitarian structure.

Management guru, Peter Drucker, argued that CEOs should not receive more than 20 times the pay of regular employees; that to pay more was unjustifiable, that to pay more was a sign of a poorly performing firm, and in terms of capitalism, would reflect the reality of obvious organizational inefficiencies. We need only recall rapacious executives like the Rigas family who stole a billion dollars from their firm, or Enron, Tyco, “Chainsaw Al†Dunlap and his cronies who were described as the “Bosses From Hell†featured in pro-business magazine, to have an awareness of the problems of greedy CEOs and their “corrupt cultures,†descriptions which may go on ad nauseum.

The great philosopher, Socrates, argued that no society could be ethical in which those at the top enjoyed incomes greater than a 5:1 ratio with the citizens at the bottom. To exceed this would be immoral and unethical. So to those readers defending the status quo of greed as a necessary evil because there’s no other option, I would simply say, of course there are. Consider the hugely successful Mondragon cooperatives, a close parallel to the United Order. It has grown from an impoverished group of 5 young men into an economic engine in the Basque country of northern Spain. How? By emphasizing equality and collaboration instead of power and greed. By caring for the group, not so-called rugged individualism. They designed their system based on economic justice. They do not seek to go back to the farm or live in a hovel of past eras. Instead, they are high tech. They use state of the art technologies to create jobs, while American managers do do to downsize. They are capital-intensive, not labor intensive. They have only had a handful of 200-plus worker-owned firms fail in 60 years, and even then gave everyone a job in the other enterprises. What’s more, they have never had a layoff. What region or industry in America has a record even close to this? With only 2-3 percent of firms going bankrupt? With a pay ration of 7:1 throughout these many companies and their 60,000 people?

These are not wild, naïve ideas, nor fantasies about some kind of distant, utopian future which in reality may never be achieved. Instead, they are concrete examples of successful contemporary economic systems which are very different from that of America, but which could be applicable if done with cooperative principles and effective planning.

It is apparent that Brigham Young did have a higher level of compensation or lifestyle than many during the pioneer era of Utah. But even in this case it was only 3-5 times what the average family enjoyed. In that era, America was much more egalitarian than today’s social structure. Within the United Order ideal, Brigham clarified that it was not to be a narrow, strict, mathematical equality, but rather an approximate equality in which there would be a large middle class consisting of most families having roughly the same lifestyle as one another. That would be a sign we have reached Zion. This is a huge contrast compared to the princes of our day who build $30 million mansions and own multiple homes, justifying such practices or lifestyles as some ultra-rich Mormons do, that they are simply taking care of their families. Well did Elder Dallin Oaks point out that in our LDS rush to dismantle communism, we ended up embracing materialism.

A couple readers nicely observed that we have poor families all around us, and that we don’t need to travel afar to serve those who suffer. This is an important point, and I concur completely. Each of us has the opportunity, indeed, the moral obligation, to assist those in our own communities who may lack shelter, food, healthcare, and jobs. If we don’t notice them, we ought to open our eyes. In truth, we are to seek them out, not simply respond if we happen to notice. As the Savior taught, such individuals are our neighbors, and we are indeed our brothers’ keepers.

Several reader comments praised today’s rising capitalism in the Third World as evidence that it has clearly improved lives for the masses. But unfortunately, we still have huge numbers of people who live in abject poverty. Over a billion of the “hyper poor†try to eke out an existence on less than a dollar a day. More than 1.3 billion more attempt to survive on under $2 a day. A quarter of all Asia is officially poor. More so in sub-Saharan Africa, where millions of people die from preventable disease, additional millions are homeless because of conflict and drought, and millions more barely exist, slowly succumbing to a gradual death in places like Darfur. Globally, hundreds of millions living don’t even own a piece of land for building a shanty. Malnourished children suffer extended stomachs before dying while we flip the TV channel to avoid the poignant video clips.

One reader declared that â€Thirty years ago billions of people in Asia and Latin America were under the yoke of government-controlled economies that kept them enchained in poverty and despair,†continuing to assert they are out of poverty now. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Perhaps, except it’s not true. They are now being exploited by MNCs and the power of globalization which is a lot more crushing than governments in the past. No wonder there is such a huge outcry against U.S. foreign policy by millions of protesters who see the new control asserted by core countries as they depress the markets and economies of those in the periphery. So far, the benefits of today’s capitalism have mostly accrued to rich nations, making them wealthier than ever before.

As is well-known, the rich countries (U.S. and Europe) have controlled 80 percent of the world’s income during the 20th Century. It totaled about $51 trillion last year. We took most of it while a few countries remained stagnant in the middle. The rest languished in dangerous and declining environments which are so bad these countries now have a new name, the 4th World. We in our comfortable U.S. context enjoy a very good lifestyle, while our brothers and sisters in 40 nations are currently worse off than they were a decade ago. This is true among many Latter-day Saints as well.

A couple of readers who went to my website asked about becoming involved in the efforts our NGOs are making to lift the world’s poor, both globally and here in Utah, as well. We have dozens of programs and strategies for empowering the poor and building economic self-reliance. In 2006 16 of these social enterprises that had been spun off from my BYU courses in recent years raised some $10 million, trained over 170,000 microentrepreneurs, and we grew to have a microcredit client base of more than 1.2 million families. I’m currently calculating the results for 2007, and it appears the numbers will be at least double those of the year earlier.

This fact suggests that we can all do more. We can have increasingly greater impacts for good. No one can do everything, but we can each do something. None of us can ignore D&C 58, and simply wait for the bishop or church headquarters to command us. Instead, we need to pray, dig down deep, and find the power within ourselves to be agents of change. For those interested, go to http://www.marriottschool.byu.edu/emp/WPW .

Another theme in the reactions of many comments had to do with conspicuous consumption, or what we may call “The Lifestyles of Mormonism’s Rich and Famous.†Geoff B. praised “our wonderful global capitalist system,†suggesting that I can’t go around blaming the system. Oh yes I can, and oh yes, I do. I do so right here in my Marriott School office where I’m keyboarding now, and in my MBA classes located here in what I call the “great and spacious building†at BYU.

The current capitalist system is certainly not the vision Adam Smith sought, nor Joseph Smith, for that matter. Yes, greedy Walmart offers us lots of cheap goods, but this occurs because of the low wages and near-slave labor it forces on Asian suppliers. I believe we should pay more when we go shopping so that Third World women and children can have a better quality of life, instead of me enjoying the cheapest prices possible.

Regarding those readers who praised the availability of multiple choices for all kinds of products, I would simply suggest that there may be pluses for this, but also minuses. We seem to live much like hamsters in cages, racing in a never-ending spin on our economic treadmills. The more choices there are, apparently the more we want to buy and consume. What benefit is there in the eternal scheme of things to have 100 different kinds of crackers? Two hundred alternative soda drinks? Three hundred variations of breakfast cereals? These things don’t create a more meaningful life. Instead, they generate greater consumption habits. The more alternatives we have, the more we seem to “need.â€

By the way, most of these product choices are derived, not because there is a market demand for them. Instead, corporations create these markets by spending billions of dollars advertising in the print and electronic media about how important it is to have all this “stuff.†For many Mormons, like the Protestant ethic, we tend to believe that having all of these kinds of products, one of each preferably, shows that because we can afford them, they somehow must be important. They apparently show that God favors us because we are so successful materially.

In closing, let me respond to those who declare that crazy old Hugh Nibley pushed for a Zion lifestyle that we don’t yet need to live. Maybe I’m crazy too. One writer said he is prepared to sell everything and give it to the Church if the prophet asks him to do so. I may be wrong, but wasn’t this the dilemma of the rich young ruler? He too couldn’t consecrate everything he owned. As I understand it correctly, we are to initiate the principles of stewardship, not wait to be “commanded in all things.†The only way to build Zion is to inch forward in becoming a covenant community, one step at a time, one family at a time.

In the temple, don’t we covenant to live the Law of Consecration here and now? Or does it say to do so later, when it’s more convenient? Or when we’re all millionaires? I believe there would be more explicit encouragement from church leaders for our people to fully live the laws of Zion now if we could just get beyond our own materialism. Obviously the Welfare Plan, fast offerings, the Humanitarian Fund, Latter-day Saint Charities, and the Perpetual Education Fund are mechanisms to prod us toward the great end, Zion. Yet apparently many are dragging their feet in protest and trying to cling to the one and only clear financial commandment they can handle, a tithe of 10 percent max! They feel anything else is merely optional. Prideful living and our competition with the Joneses inhibit our ability to approach Zion. It seems to me that we each need to take action in our personal lives here and now—to live what the scriptures explicitly command us to do–not at some ethereal time in the future when we are comfortably dwelling in Independence, Missouri.

Any further responses or rebuttals?

Now in terms of Nibley’s “ideal” which is a little overly Platonic and otherworldly for my tastes I agree. I also think there’s a bit of hypocrisy in it all – but I won’t go into that. (Suffice to say I wonder if Nibley would be decrying materialism had he limited access to that nice Library and had to work outside of academics – Nibley was lucky in that the material things he wanted he had in spades and that he could justify away as not really being material)

My big concern is that there are poor who’s needs aren’t being met. Here in Utah they have extremely poor programs for children with special needs. (Say Autism) That seems like something you’d think would be better here than in most places. But it ends up being quite bad. One would think all the Libertarian idealists would have set up charities to fulfill the need but they aren’t there.

My personal feeling is that in Utah, people like to talk about consecration and then take the lack of Church organization to imply that they can do a little bit and leave the problems in place. Any attempt to resolve this on the local or State level gets met with opposition.

Now we can debate how to meet these needs. However one thing is clear – that those who ought to be meeting them (the Saints) aren’t.

It’s one thing to be saying we can improve on our own. (Which I agree 100% with) However most of us tend to go out of our ways to make sure the improvement is gradual enough so as to take very little effort and achieve very few results. Meanwhile we are quite intent on getting all the toys to play with we want.

I’m sure we will be held accountable for this as a people by God.

I think the important thing to remember is that we have poor among us and we have been commanded to take care of them. We each have differing ideas on how to go about it. I think everyone has brought wonderful ideas to the table and I appreciate the message Dr. Woodworth conveyed in his post. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but it made me think.

Happy New Year’s to one and all!

If you believe that thinking oneself deserving of the compensation one receives is consistent with salvation, perhaps you should read King Benjamin again. And, if you think that looking around at others and comparing your compensation to theirs is consistent with salvation, then perhaps you should read Pres. Benson on pride.

And, if you can provide any reason to explain executive or other compensation in the multi-million dollar range other than pride (am I making more than that other guy?) or greed, I’m happy to hear it.

Finally, if your conclusion that consecration is not now expected of us depends on Bro. Nibley’s definition, I’d suggest that you’re arguing with a straw man. I wasn’t aware that his interpretations were authoritative.