That distribution is an "at the expense of" issue.
We don't have national distribution of most of our wealth.
As for the CEO, his wealth gets distributed to him, from his company, not for the country as a whole, and its compensation for his services, not a simple distribution to him.
Its more a cost to the shareholders than to other employees (CEO's often get more in stock options than cash, and CEO's of large corporations rarely make up a very significant part of the corporations payroll expenses). If the CEO is overpaid thats an issue of shareholders, not an issue for the federal government, and esp. not an issue that should cause the government to punish the shareholders by increasing the taxes they pay.
To the extent that CEO's of large corporations are overpaid its mostly a matter of bad CEOs still getting huge amounts of compensation. The decisions of a CEO have an impact on the company (at least when we are referring to CEO's of big corporations) that normally far exceeds the pay that CEO's receives. If their is any significant correlation at all between paying more and getting a better CEO than very high compensation for CEOs makes sense. I believe there may not be as high or correlation between the two as might be expected, but I don't think there is no significant correlation. At the very least if you do have a CEO who does an outstanding job, your going to have to pay him well or some other company is likely to snatch him from you. This is a factor driving high compensation for all CEOs because if the best get a ton, than there will be competition with less money for the next best, and so on, and also because its hard to predict how well a CEO will perform. (If you could predict it reliably, than the top CEO's would make a lot more, but you wouldn't get many large payments to bums). |
