The "Problem" With CEO Pay
Jane Galt's attempt to explain away the relatively small practical problems with large CEO salaries totally misses the point of nearly all the criticism aimed at them.
Absolutely: people harping on multi-million dollar compensation packages don't understand the complicated financing that occurs not only when the deals are made but as the deals mature and complete
Absolutely: converting high CEO pay into some "socially useful" function would require the radical realignment of whole industries at a moment's notice
But this doesn't really matter to most of the people who bitch about business executives making 40 times the money of the regular guys working for the company. Their objection is fundamentally moral. They think it is simply wrong for someone to make that much money, regardless of what he or she does. They see big bonuses and they retch. Listen how often people describe the top pay packages as "obscene."
They see inequality as a sin.
Therefore, even if you could rebut their think tank arguments about some objective measure of a negative economic outcome, they'd still fall back on what really bothers them: the free market does not produce egalitarian results. By not confronting that complaint squarely, 90% of today's "free market" defenses are simply wasting their time by, in effect, spending their energies trying to knock down agile straw men with the damned lies of economic statistics.