A businessman in Seattle has made news by raising all salaries in his company to $70,000 a year. He’s temporarily lowering his own to the same amount until the company brings in enough profit to pay for the rise in salaries. Dan Price, founder of Gravity Payments, said he wanted to do something to address the issue of inequality.

“The market rate for me as a CEO compared to a regular person is ridiculous. It’s absurd,” Price was quoted in The Seattle Times.

Is Price against capitalism? Isn’t the goal of capitalism to be as efficient as possible? To produce the most goods or services with the least amount of cost to the producer? Isn’t that the Wall Street credo?

Perhaps the principle of the goose who lays the golden egg also applies. Kill the goose, and you have no more golden eggs. Treat your hired hands badly, and they will be uninterested in serving you. They will leave for another employer as soon as they can, forcing you to spend valuable time training someone else to take their place. And unhappy employees will be less productive.

A few employers may have read the Biblical warning to landowners not to reap crops to the very borders of their fields. Leave some, the passage says, for the poor, the widows, and the orphans. Capitalist ownership of land is not condemned. Too much capitalist efficiency is.