Paying ridiculous above market salaries started off as a tax evasion/nepotism advancement mechanism for the ultra wealthy, but had actually evolved to also become a selection and grooming technique used by the ultra wealthy to achieve state capture in the west.
The practice goes something along the lines of creating some extremely high paying posts that have a vast number of suitable candidates. This is the above market aspect where the individuals earning these megabucks salaries could not possibly get anywhere close to the same compensation anywhere else. This is fundamentally different from people getting paid megabucks because of their own skills/capabilities, for example like world class professional athletes or award winning scientists/inventors etc.
The very act of paying so vastly above market rates creates an equally vast power imbalance where the boss can ask the employee to do basically anything. If the employee doesn’t like that then they can leave and there are literally a million other candidates ready and able to step in to take their place.
The true value of this power dynamic isn’t that a boss can lord it over his underlyings, but that it can be used to influence people in highly powerful and influential positions of power.
This is how legalised corruption and state capture works in the west. Government officials make decisions to benefit the ultra wealthy, and what do you know, those officials’ offspring gets selected to go into some of these megabucks paying positions in the companies of the ultra wealth individuals who just make ludicrous amounts of money from those government decisions.
Once so employed, the offspring of the government officials will then get assigned to work on lucrative government contracts, and basically becomes hostages for the company, which can now go over budget and not deliver on time to milk the taxpayer for many times the value of the original contract. If the government were to find the company at fault, then the offspring of the government officials will also be found at fault and fired from their once-in-a-lifetime dream job, so is it any wonder the government always gets taken for a ride by these companies and never imposes any consequences on them?
Beijing saw how these Trojan horse jobs were used to thoroughly comprise the west, which was is why it is nipping this poisonous weed in the bud before it can take root too deeply.
