Plato said the maximum difference between lowest paid workers and highest paid workers (that would include CEO's and those who receive stock options) should be no more than 6:1.
J.P. Morgan, unethical as he is, said 20:1.
Today that number is somewhere over 1000:1.
Can you say 'apocalypse'!
Reformed capitalism needs these elements:
1. Tax consumption not income (that especially includes land ownership). No more free ride in their sleep for the 'rentier class' and property appreciation.
2. You do not need employee owned businesses (for example, an employee should have the option to spend all his money rather than be an owner of a company).
3. Do not go back to a gold standard, for a system that rewards countries that are fiscally and monetarily responsible deserve to benefit (the destructive nature of inflating your national currency is everything becomes too expensive to import cheaply which is an inefficient system. So let it be.
Printing money has an inbuilt equalizer. Countries that print too much can't afford to import as much so they must build their own resources. Their exports become more competitive creating a bottom in the economy until they find their efficiency.
Printing less money improves a country's wealth and enables it to import cheaply, but exports become more challenging.
This is the great stabilizer. If you bring back the gold standard this 'fairness stabilizer' of printing money is lost. Even worse there could be too much inflation because gold is being produced faster than the growth of the population; or, deflation because gold is being produced at too slow a pace.
And actually, a gold standard becomes that much worse because a country could print its own currency as much as they want and as it is linked to the US Dollar artificial wealth is created as they keep redeeming their currency for gold. Whereas USA could print as much as it wants and each dollar is still worth say $1000 per ounce. People would get jipped because they should be getting say $2000 per ounce when the government set figure is only $1000.
A gold standard fails because governments are not good at estimating the proper price of gold so leave gold out of it. Treat it like any other commodity. And let the exchange rates do what they do best acting as the great stabilizer.
The fiat system is fine except for the fact that central banks need not be private corporations owned by the 85 richest people in the world. Rather, let the government be responsible unto itself by making its central bank wholly owned and controlled by the government itself.
And don't forget to let companies too big to fail to let them fail into bankruptcy to clean out the inefficient systems. National interests that prop up such failing entities just creates inefficiencies and currency debasement. If companies are clear on this ahead of time, they will be less likely to fail. But if they know they will be bailed out and bailed in, then of course they will take inordinate risks. The good governments will be rewarded by doing the right thing. In the short term it may appear the manipulators got away with something, but they will eventually pay the price by GDP figures and currency hardships.