onenerdykidBut people seem to have no problem saying that an easily replaceable worker should never get paid more than 10$ an hour but somehow a CEO getting paid 156 million dollars a year is absolutely ok. I do find that line of thought extraordinarily odd.
Please point out anyone who is saying this. People get paid what the market will bear regardless of whether they're replaceable or not, there's just a huge supply of easily replaceable workers (that's why we're calling them easily replaceable). If I needed someone to do job X, and I couldn't find anyone who could do it well for $10 an hour, then I'd pay what it would cost to find such a person. So yeah, no one anywhere is saying that "an easily replaceable worker should
never get paid more than 10$ an hour", that's a straw man.
Granted, $156 million is an outlier as far as CEO pay goes, but at the end of the day, presumably the company has concluded that that's what it takes to keep this guy running their show, that this is the guy they want running it (presumably because they're doing pretty well), and that if they paid someone else less money to do it, the company would be worse off overall. That's a business decision that you're not qualified to make generally, and certainly don't have the inside knowledge to make about any particular company.
The same goes for the people taking $1 in salary. Presumably, that's a conscious decision by them in light of the state of the company. The company, meanwhile, is saying "we want this guy to do the job, and he's willing to take $1 for it, so we'll pay him that. If we wanted someone else to do the job who wouldn't take $1, we'd weigh the pros and cons of spending more money on a CEO against the better results they'd provide".
At the end of the day, it's pretty simple: you don't get to decide how businesses should spend their money. If they spend it poorly, they generally won't last long.
