Louis Brandeis, SCOTUS AND OTHER QUOTES

• What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty, and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice. 
• •  Louis Brandeis, SCOTUS
  • “True Americanism” (1915).
  
  
   Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.
  
  Reported in Osmond Kessler Fraenkel, Clarence Martin Lewis, The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1965), p. 43
  
  
   Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business have become an institution-an institution which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state. The typical business corporation of the last century, owned by a small group of individuals, managed by their owners, and limited in size by their private wealth, is being supplanted by huge concerns in which the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and the property of tens of hundreds of thousands of investors are subjected, through the corporate mechanism, to the control of a few men. Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power. And, as ownership of the shares is becoming continually more dispersed, the power which formerly accompanied ownership is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few... [and] coincident with the growth of these giant corporations, there has occurred a marked concentration of individual wealth; and that the resulting disparity in incomes is a major cause of the existing depression.
  
   Louis Brandeis, SCOTUS
  
  • Dissent, Liggett Co. v. Lee, 288 U.S. 517 (1933), at 565-67.
  
  
    Brandeis, who predicted the crash of 1929 and would have predicted the crash of 2008, was the most far-seeing prophet of economic regulation in an age of financial crisis and the most ferocious critic of “the curse of bigness” in an age that anticipated “too big to fail.”
  
  
   http://www.newrepublic.com/article/75902/why-brandeis-matters
  
  
  
   Brandeis’s legacy as an economic prophet rests on Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, the remarkable book that he published in 1914, based on a series of prescient articles he had written the previous year for Harper’s. Those articles were written to promote the findings of the Pujo Committee, a House banking subcommittee in 1912 headed by Arsène Pujo of Louisiana. Convened to investigate the excesses of the “money trust,” the Pujo Committee concluded that a small group of Wall Street bankers had abused the public’s trust by consolidating their control over banks and industries, choking off credit and competition in the process. Brandeis set out to enumerate the ways that “our financial oligarchy” threatened not only the American economy but also American democracy.
  
  
  
   “The American people have as little need of oligarchy in business as in politics,” Brandeis declared.
  
  
  In 1890, there was no national constituency about the dangers of corporate bigness; but twenty years later the Progressive movement had been so successful that presidential candidates in both parties crusaded against the money trusts, although they disagreed about the appropriate responses
  
  
  
   http://www.newrepublic.com/article/75902/why-brandeis-matters
  

Higher the Pay, the Worse the CEO

Study: The Higher the Pay, the Worse the CEO (Vocativ)
Daniel Edward Rosen looks at a study from the University of Utah, which shows that companies that pay CEOs more than $20 million a year have average annual losses over $1 billion.


 http://www.vocativ.com/money/business/study-higher-pay-worse-ceo/

• Roosevelt Take: Roosevelt Institute Fellow and Director of Research Susan Holmberg and Campus Network alumna Lydia Austin look at additional ways high CEO pay distorts the economy.

 Fixing a Hole: How the Tax Code for Executive Pay Distorts Economic Incentives and Burdens Taxpayers

 http://rooseveltinstitute.org/policy-and-ideas/big-ideas/fixing-hole-how-tax-code-executive-pay-distorts-economic-incentives