Thanks for your thoughts! I like getting the European thinking in here, as well. (FYI - I lived in Budapest for 7 years, only a decade after the Berlin Wall came down. So I watched as Eastern Europe awoke from Communism, and moved into parliamentary democracies. It was an eye-opening time.)

There are several issues you are glossing over, to make easy points. But they all stem from the core underlying element of everything I have said in this conversation: CEO's are not properly incentivized by their Boards of Directors and shareholders. They are doing EXACTLY the job they are hired to do, and hitting their targets, so they are getting the bid paydays.

The reason, as you say, "CEO pay correlates negatively with employees' share of the companies' profits" is because of the short-term profit focus of American corporate governance. It has nothing to do with the CEO. They are given targets to hit, and incentives for hitting those targets. Blame them for doing their job well...? Ok. But it misses the entire point.

If a company incentivized their CEO to build a business with a strong Triple Bottom Line, that doesn't externalize their cost of operations onto government and charity aid programs, and still makes a solid profit for the company, then I don't care if that CEO gets a BILLION dollars a year in compensation.

Being upset about CEO pay is myopic and ultimately a waste of time. "Too much" is a sliding scale that has infinite settings; none of which will make everyone happy.

Shareholders and Boards need to be held to a higher standard of performance than just quarterly earnings or EBIT. If a company is hurting because the public won't buy their products, they will change the way they do business. They will change how they measure the success of their CEO.

If a board incentivized a CEO to make the entire company carbon-neutral in a year, and promised them a $500m bonus for doing so, they'd make it happen. Period.

The incentives are set wrong. Not the pay scales.