Wage Regulation...

...and not the kind you think. I was reading this article, which is an interview with Noam Chomsky. He makes the following statement: ...Henry Ford famously tried to pay his workers a higher wage than the going wage, because partly on this reasoning – he was not a theoretical economist, but partly on the grounds that if he doesn’t pay his workers enough and other people won’t pay their workers enough, there’s going to be nobody around to buy his model-T Fords. Actually that issue came to court in the United States, around 1916 or so, and led to a fundamental principle of Anglo-American law, which is part of the reason why the Anglo-American system is slightly different from the European social market system. There was a famous case called “Dodge v. Ford.” ... The courts decided that the management of the corporation has the legal responsibility to maximize the yield of the profit to its stockholders, that’s its job. The corporations had already been granted the right of persons, and this basically says they have to be a certain type of pathological person, a person that does nothing except try to maximize his own gain... I had no idea that such legal rulings existed, but in fact it does - more information on the case is located here. Amazingly, it seems that the US courts do not allow a company to pay whatever salary it wishes. Its only responsibility is to make lots of money for investors. Paying employees more than the "going rate" is not legally acceptable. Is this the Twilight Zone?