[Radix]

"Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld earned almost $500 million over the last eight years while leading a once-mighty firm into bankruptcy."

[pnh102]

Why not simply pay executives a stipend for living expenses and then give them a percentage of the profits for a given year?

I am not suggesting this be made a law or anything like that but I would think it would be one way to entice executive management to work harder.

[Seruzawa]

The inequities of the market are legion. Govt solutions are far worse.

[Our man in washington]

Ask people if they think executive compensation should be capped and a lot of people would say “of course!” Now ask them if their favorite professional sports team should cap their quarterback’s pay at twenty times the entry level salary for a rookie. If a team did this, the fans would say the owner is “to cheap to get a really good quarterback.”

[johncatl]

The problem isn't how much they are paid is that it does not match performance.

Thanks to the cozy relationships with the financial community, the large stakeholders, the directors and the financial press it's been a scam for many years.

As far as paying for "performance", look at what happened at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bosses just "cooked the books" and so far no one has gone to jail.

The supposed "free market" was more like a "free for all".

[M203M4]

Equality and fairness are not synonyms. Compensation and “value” are not equivalent, nor should they be.

And CEOs on the whole are not the most blatant examples of the mismatch between “value” and compensation (there are of course exceptions, as in every profession) - look instead to actors, singers, pro athletes. Regardless of their performance, their activity, in a hard sense, does not justify compensation above subsistence.

I don’t know anyone who touts the free-market because they think it will lead to “equality” or a stronger correlation between compensation and “value”. If such a person exists, they suffer from a variant of the utopian delusion of lefties.

[stompk]

“But his mind changed when a firefighter’s widow asked him: “Why are you giving me less money than the banker who represented Enron? Why are you demeaning the memory of my husband?”
“

This makes a good story and tugs at the heart strings. It is the cry of the Communist that all mens labor is equal.

However, if one man spends years in college or learning a trade, his value to the company MUST be worth more than the man holding a shovel.

CEOs pay MUST be tied to performance though. theft should be punished and “golden parachutes” need to be replaced with “concrete shoes”

[BobbyT]

Herman Miller?

Would this be 900-dollars-for-a-floor-model chairmaker Herman Miller?