CEOs work harder every hour than their wage slaves do every season.

[Tiberius]

Have you listened to how they talk about the poor people of the world? The idea there sure seems to be that they didn't do enough work to deserve more than minimum wage. Why can't we apply the same logic to the people at the upper end of that spectrum?

I never said you can't apply the same logic to them. The problem is, what people 'deserve' and how much a job is 'worth' are subjective. An unskilled worker may feel that they deserve a certain amount, but at the end of the day, they can be replaced by hundreds of people who would love to have any job. For a business, paying unskilled employees the least amount of money they will accept for a job is one of the ways you maximize profit.

Unfortunately, society has developed in such a way that almost the same thing applies for CEOs. All the big companies pay their CEOs large amounts, so a company that tries to hire a CEO for less than expected will not find many people willing to take the salary (bear in mind most CEOs have done the job before, or were other types of executive, and so used to large salaries). Take the example of Ben and Jerry's, an ice-cream company that originally had a corporate policy where the maximum a person could earn was 7 times that of the lowest paid employee. It was a great policy whilst the company was growing, but it had to be scrapped eventually, because they wouldn't have been able to hire the people they wanted.

So I think we agree with the general sentiment that CEOs could definitely earn less, but we disagree on what should be done about it. You likely believe the government should step in and cap salaries. I believe it's none of the government's business, and instead we should focus on changing social values, organizing boycots, and if the government is to be involved at all, it should be to pass sweeping legislation to end corporatism and stop businesses trying to create laws that favour them and try to squash their competition.