"Yes, and the stupid shall be punished."

And it is their right and their money with which to BE stupid and the market will reward them or not. You seem to think that just because YOU think it is a bad decision, that suddenly you are the arbiter of good and fair. That is what leads to dictators and power-mongers, socialism and higher taxes.

Can you say you've never made a bad decision in your life? I know I can't. They happen all the time. But unless you are omnipotent and never make mistakes, I'm certainly not going to advocate that you make my decisions for me!

And let's admit that people get hired in the HOPE that they will bring value, but that hope isn't always realized. There is a real danger however in preventing mistakes as errors are frequently the best learning tools!

This is perhaps your first cogent point on this thread. The question is, would you propose that the GOVERNMENT be the ones to oversee executive pay levels given that they've destroyed entire ECONOMIES more than once through their policies?

I think that if you look a little closer, you'll find out that the real problem with many of these things is the government's involvement in the first place!

Your sources belie your true source of outrage. You're seriously going to quote left-wing rags like the Huffing-and-Puffington Post or Daily Communist?

All they are doing is peddling the victim mindset: that somehow these companies are damaging YOU by these actions. It is pointless to waste your time envying someone else's success - even if it is somehow undeserved.

Life isn't fair. Liberals like to sell people the farce that it is or can be made so through enough government interference or regulation. In the marketplace of ideals, that is a particularly useless one to invest in - it yields negative returns in freedom and capitalism. I suggest that you sell off that portfolio and invest in something with a positive return.

You may argue that the structure of the compensation package isn't what you like, but you really don't have any say whatsoever in the pay unless you are on the Board. You may be envious of how much someone else makes (because that's really what it comes down to) and there may even be some real cronyism and favoritism involved.

The real question is: are you going to sit there and complain about? Are you going to do the same thing that happens in "Atlas Shrugged" and buddy up with lawmakers to arbitrarily penalize success? Or are you going to concentrate on what YOU can do: work your own way to the top?

Barring that, you can always create a media firestorm and boycott.

This is the same Occupy Wall Street/1% nonsense that paints everyone as victims of capitalism and the participants to this forum should see right through it. It's demonization, pure and simple and leads to gross abuse of power by enraged people who are using their envy instead of their logic.

Look at it another way: only 50 years ago, there wasn't a big enough economy for any CEO to make that much!

Beautiful and spot on.

But wait. Just stop eating Big Macs. As long as the government doesn't require us to eat that stuff, it's all good (pun intended).

Now if the head of HHS was making a fortune, or the people who made that website healthcare.gov were making a killing (pun intended) then it would be different. Because the government IS making us use their product.

Then, in backroom board deals, they give each other raises. And because of the fragmented nature of share ownership today in most large companies, the shareholders do not have much say in these companies that are being run by managers for the benefit of managers at the expense of the distributed owners and the institutional shareholders. Bogle. The guy who ran Vanguard talks a lot about this in his writings and speeches.

I think there is a mistaken notion among many Ayn Rand fans that most businesses and businessmen today are Rearden Steel and Hank Rearden or Dagny Taggert. Instead, most successful businesses today have their hands deep in the government's pockets (or up the back of their shirts pulling their strings). They hire armies of Wesley Mouch's to get special favors for their business to give them a "competitive advantage" (like a major oil company that I know of from firsthand experience that got a tax break written into the tax code that could only apply to them at one of their facilities and was not applicable, in the time window provided, to any other companies - although it never stated them by name). They help to write massive laws that benefit their industry. They are the Jim Taggerts and Orren Boyles of today. We cannot logically turn everything into a government vs. business thing. The government-industrial complex is real, it's complex, and it bears little resemblance to the kinds of virtues espoused in AS.

Exactly! The government of the United States foisted the biggest lie in history on us when they took us off the gold standard. It was a blank check and has led to runaway spending ever since.Look at the Billions they have printed in the last 2 years to pay for buying US debt. They bought bad debt with fake money and patted themselves on the back for creating the biggest stock bubble since 1929, and you know what happened after that....

Excellent point Stormi!

Hiraghm, it has nothing to do with "my stake" or "personal stake" or whatever. You can pick almost any company and get the same results. The point is, it is an ongoing spiral, alongside the ongoing gov't spiral. Those 2 spirals were EXACTLY what AR saw back in the late 50's. Her prophesy of the end result is also not in doubt because you cannot have the 2 spirals continue until they have consumed everything in their path! You cannot have business pay the top 1% of each company greater and greater amounts, and government concoct ways to steal greater and greater amounts, and still have a middle class!!!! If it doesn't stop WE ARE TOAST! And digging your head in the sand and saying "it's none of your business" is not valid. It is ALL of our business, because it will effect all of us sooner than later.

Not when they pay the CEO 10 times more than today, and had to lay off the pickle dude, and stop using pickles "too cut costs". My point is that there is a responsible limit that should be observed, yes the more responsibility you have, the more you should be paid, same for experience education etc... It's just that it has gone way over the top, and some of these guys you wouldn't want mowing your grass...

lol

"I am worth it because I am worth it" isn't really an accurate description of the situation. More like "because the board of directors think I'm worth it." A CEO's job is to increase profits for the shareholders. If he does that well, he should be compensated well. If the majority of shareholders feel he is overcompensated, they can put him out on the street, even if it means replacing the board.

*sigh*

By your logic, "I'm sorry, but no car is worth $500,000".

By your logic, "I'm sorry, but no house is worth $3,500,000"

By your logic, "I'm sorry, but no diamond is worth $7,000,000"

By your logic, "I'm sorry, but no piece of cardboard is worth $1500, not even a Nolan Ryan rookie card".

Really... anything is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. OBVIOUSLY they're worth it because someone's willing to pay it. And who are you, on the outside, to go to someone and say "I'm sorry, you can't pay him that much".

If you don't like it, you start your own McDonald's or Fivebucks and don't pay your CEO that much money. Whatever, your company.

Right on, right on, right on! And the value of money is ONLY determined after it has been given value by the private producer. The FED can print all the paper it wants, but we give it its value by what we will buy with it or by what we will demand in compensation for our efforts in exchange for those dollars. Look what Robert Mugabe did to Rhodesia, I mean Zimbabwe. Trillion dollar notes worth nothing.

I worked in finance for an international machine tool company. The CEO was well paid, but he knew the business and the product and ran the company well. When he retired, some nitwit CEO came in to a large salary, and immediately hired some hotshot MBAs who did all their decision making from offices, by looking over greenbar printouts .I doubt they ever talked to anyone in the shop. much less viewed the product.. They were paid too well. The company failed after the CEO took their advice, the CEOs fled to new overpaid jobs in Calif. and hundreds of people were out of work. Not all CEOs are created equal, and there seems to be a disconnect between that factor and the amount someone is paid for just being the CEO. Too many people are pushed up the corporate ladder based on how well they talk the game, even if they never deliver the goods.There is a definite problem with value for value when it comes to CEO hiring and pay. Employment laws protect people from self responsibility for their poor performances, by keeping employment matters secret.
Suddenly raising the hourly pay by leaps and bounds is not a solution to what goes on at the top. Perhaps, 401K sharing or other benefit packages would be better to foster self-direction by hourly employees. The CEOs, like our overpaid Congress, always have Cadillac packages, and just how have they actually earned them? When the CEO, or members of Congress fail to do their homework, their pay should be cut or they should be out, but that is not what we see happening.

Then get together with your friends and rectify the situation: buy up every available share of McDonalds stock, take over the board and find somebody who can and will do just as good a job for less money.

Don't get too caught up in thinking that just because someone works at Micky D's that they are dumb, and that because some other goober has wormed his way up he is a veritable genius. I work with a lot of PHd and MS grads, and some of them are so brilliant you wonder how they find their way to work. Without that pickle planter, there would be NO Micky D, but without that CEO, the corporate machine continues to chug. There are a lot of "managers" who are managers today simply because they can't be trusted with sharp objects....

If you were ever on the inside of a boardroom instead of outside snipping, you would find that the is a very competitive pecking order as an executive moves through a company. The major cause of the migration is not retirement, but the cyclic rise and fall of the stock values.

A company that experiences a 2% drop in stock value (that is isolated from monetary events) may see the CEO's head on the chopping block. At the very least, several board members will be moving along.

A 1% increase in the value of McDonalds stock may represent a couple billion dollars increase. A CEO that can pilot a company through that kind of increase is well worth a few million in bonus or raise.