> if there is remuneration
> for effort and sacrifice,
By that standard, the Jesus Christ dude would be a billionaire... That is not to say that I do not feel sorry for the dude, he should not have got the treatment he did for what amounted to kvetching and story telling, but I would not pay a dime for his self-styled sacrifice either. I think this betrays an unmistakably Catholic "ora et labora" - or Maoist if you will - trait in parecon: "manual labor- good, pointy-heady labor - bad."
Of course, I do appreciate the concept of "balanced jobs" that corporate capitalism is destroying (which was, btw, a centerpiece of Braverman's work), but you can get only so far with it. Indeed, there is no bona fide reason in the world that can justify executive salaries in the US in terms any output these guys can possibly produce. I concocted a phrase Mosquito Intake Theory of Executive Compensation (MITEC) to describe that phenomenon. Mosquitoes do not have lungs, they cannot suck, so the amount of blood they take in depends entirely on the pressure in the blood vessel to which they manage to tap. Likewise, the amount of executive compensation depends mainly on the volume of other people's money these suckers manage to put their hands on.
But the fact that many US execs are obscenely overpaid does not mean that anyone can do their job. That is simply naïve. Managing people requires a lot of skill, responsibility and risk taking and not everyone is willing to take that risk and responsibility. I for, example, would rather have an academic sinecure for a moderate compensation that allows me doing what I like than a management job that pays considerably more but also demands a lot of time, energy, schmoozing with people I would rather not to, risk etc. I think that people who are willing and able to do this kind of job should be compensated proportionally more than those who, like myself, take a more leisurely approach to work.
Another thing - I still remember times from my other life on the other side of the iron curtain when the management had virtually no power to discipline workers. Termination of employment had to go through the "labor courts" which were generally slanted in favor of employees, and was very difficult to obtain. As a result, people were slacking on their jobs big time - it was not uncommon to wait for a bus for an hour while the drivers were having a little social gathering at the terminal stop, train conductors pocketing the money instead of issuing tickets, sales clerks not bothering to serve customers, etc. Worse yet, if you had the temerity to say something about it, you would generally had to face a rude response.
In that context it was a sea change when I was in Warsaw not long ago and, having experienced a rude behavior on the part of a bus driver, I conspicuously wrote down the number of the bus and asked for the phone number of his company. As the driver's behavior changed quite dramatically, I started to appreciate the effects of the management's ability to make an employee join a "reserve army of the unemployed."
More seriously, my problem with your approach is too utopian in the same way as the neoclassical econ is - it operates on a rather abstract level and replaces one abstract overarching principle (rational self interest) with another (solidarity and cooperation) to achieve a similar objective - a balanced distribution of material resources. By so doing, both approaches assume a very sketchy and conventional conceptions of social institutions and human behavior which essentially ignore how people actually think and act. People may sometimes maximize their utility and sometimes cooperate with others to achieve common objectives, but most often they minimize their transaction costs i.e. act opportunistically to do whatever they can get away with at a moment. That transaction cost minimizing behavior is what keeps social/economic/political hierarchies alive and well.
Wojtek