12 April 2012

Hatred of directors and hatred of ability

It is objected that directors and shareholders of water firms continue to receive substantial ‘rewards’ in salaries and dividends, although the companies are failing to provide consumers with an efficient water supply.

It may be that it is simply impossible to run such a company efficiently in a country so far gone in socialism as Britain now is. It may be that it is necessary to pay directors at a commercially realistic rate in order to attract persons of high ability (which is likely to include high IQ as well as realism) in order to prevent an even worse failure in providing a reliable supply of water to customers.

In my view a company should be free to decide for itself how best to allocate its resources. I also support the idea that a company should be run for the benefit of shareholders. If it is not run for the benefit of shareholders, why should they contribute and place at risk their capital in becoming a shareholder? They may well think, as I do, that they would do better to find other ways of using their capital to increase their independence of the hostile society in which they live.

It is complained that the money spent in rewarding directors and shareholders could have been spent on repairing the fragile pipe system.

The Mail can also reveal that an astonishing £500 million was paid to the water companies’ mainly foreign shareholders for the six months to September 2011 – when drought was already blighting the East of England. Critics say this money could have been better spent fixing Britain’s fragile pipe network. (Daily Mail, 5th April 2012)

So some of the company’s resources are being applied to rewarding a population with above-average IQs, whereas the ideology dictates that resources should only be transferred from higher-IQ populations to those with a lower average IQ.

If directors’ salaries are cut, there will be less money in the hands of individuals who might decide to support other high-IQ individuals, who might then be able to do, for example, research not supported by socially recognised universities, or who might then criticise tendentious research published by them. That is to say, there would be even further reduction of the population of people who might think of coming to work for, or to support morally or financially, my suppressed independent university.

I was forced to start working towards setting this up by the ruin of my state-funded ‘education’. There was, of course, no sympathy with my terrible position as an outcast academic. There is no suggestion that the damage done to the lives of high-IQ outcasts should be repaired, and they are not acceptable objects of charitable support. They may, like me, be unable to ‘earn a living’ by regaining access to a university career at a senior level. Therefore the object has been fulfilled of reducing the access to financial resources of a high-IQ population.

If the water companies were run by the government, it is certainly not likely that more money would be spent on infrastructure; instead the money not spent on salaries or dividends would be absorbed into the collectivist ‘welfare’ system, thus, for example, providing extra support for the population of doctors, teachers and social workers. These, and especially the latter, are very likely to have IQs far below those of company directors.

A cynic might suggest that privatisation of the water companies was arranged partly to create a publicly obvious diversion of resources to a population with above-average IQs, at a level which would be regarded as egregious. This could then be attacked, functioning as a kind of showpiece scapegoat.

The overall net effect would thus be to reduce the resources in private rather than public hands. That is to say, reducing still further the freedom of individual citizens in Britain. (Not yet to absolute zero, though that could come if capitalism were abolished altogether, as is now from time to time advocated.)