Section C: The Second Leg

Once again, why do we need a Second Leg? Because the possibility exists that executives would take pay from the bottom earning ranks to meet the graph straightening requirements of the First Leg which would totally short-circuit the goals of the POPE system. This is what is known as a loophole. Loopholes, in this case, are not our friends. Allowing the greedy to make an end run around the redistributive intentions of the First Leg would be a disaster. Theoretically, if the First Leg were not supported by a Second Leg, top earners could gain access to cheap capital while doing nothing to temper excessiveness in their own pay, a situation that would simply aggravate social inequity.

The practical ends achieved by having a Second Leg are:
1.) to encourage executives to direct more of what they might otherwise take for themselves toward their lower paid co-workers, right down the line, and
2.) so that, failing the above occurring, we may augment the public funds needed for government to mitigate the diverse negative consequences to society that trace their causal beginnings to such instances of mal-distribution in pay.

Why target extravagant compensation with a context-specific POPE membership surcharge? First, because I think we greatly underestimate the negative consequences we are having to absorb by continuing to do nothing. There's a bull in the china shop and someone needs to grab that nose ring.
The consequences referred to are like an iceberg of grief - partly seen by others, but mostly unseen. The seen part forms the staple diet of want, crime and ruination peddled every evening by local TV newscasts, multiplied hundreds of times over. The far greater, unseen part consists of lost personal potential, lost individual and national growth opportunity, lost financial security and lost joy that requires a keener form of insight to gauge the full extent of. These losses represent where American society could have been if tens of millions of humbler earners had not been thwarted in their aspirations and their daily lives by the unforgiving financial odds stacked against them.
They say that, after one's first million a year, the rest is just confetti. It's a trite little homily, oft repeated and more than just a bit too flip. The trouble is, seen from another point of view, that same confetti could have meant lifeblood itself to those who might otherwise have got some of it but, instead, were forced to watch as huge amounts floated upward out of their grasp into the hands of company executives and their immediate associates.
That's the first reason I think this approach makes good social sense.
The second reason I like this approach is because it nips the problem in the bud, before temptation starts to create some sort of irresistible (though inherently tendentious) rationale for disproportionate division of the company's earnings.
If there is ever going to be anything like fairness in what people are able to earn, it's going to have to be achieved at the point of pay.
Government managed, ex post facto wealth redistribution - aka, tax and spend - is all but impossible to do to good affect here in America, as we well know. The only way that seems to have any hope of succeeding is to preempt mal-distribution right at the point of pay; and the only way we can do that is by getting executives to sign on to the idea of financial consequences for those who knowingly go along with, negotiate for, or just plain engineer, disproportionate division of the spoils of enterprise in their favor, with complete disregard for what such disparity does to those who lose out on the split.
These people aren't stupid and they aren't saints. For them to sign on to a deal like that, they're going to have to get something of value in return. In the case of POPE, the advantages extended don't go directly to top executives. They go towards the company's future prospects. The executive who loves his company will sign on; the one who is in it only for the money won't, foregoing participation in the POPE program, enabling shareholders to more easily differentiate between who's in it for the company and who's in it just for themselves.
Let's lay one potential excuse - made famous by the late Ken Lay of Enron - to rest: It's the "I just didn't know" tack. That's something we all need to get solid on; playing dumb about social inequity in these troubled times just won't cut it. How can you claim to have superior abilities of critical thinking worthy of lavishly disproportionate pay, on the one hand, while on the other, be genuinely oblivious to the bulk of negative consequences grossly disproportionate executive compensation sets in motion? Putting those two contradictory claims together inevitably exposes you as either playing dumb or just being dumb (take your pick). Whichever shortcoming pertains, a person so afflicted is not fit to head up a big corporation, let alone to be paid a princely fortune for playing at it.