"The thing is, almost everyone is a stockholder"
A stock exchange is not a socialist institution. If you don't like how much a CEO is paid, don't buy the stock. If your pension fund owns it, complain to them.
Stockholders own the company. Don't try tell people what to do with their own property, because that is not your concern.
Would you rather own stock in a company with the lowest-paid CEO or stock in a company with the highest-paid CEO?
Not enough info.......
How ever can you think I'm suggesting the stock market is or should be in any way socialist? Didn't you notice the implicit approval of Jay Gould's position in my contrast between it and the position taken by too many top managers these days?
The one open question is whether stockholder activism alone will suffice. It is just possible that the fact that there are proverbial revolving doors between corporate board rooms, top management, and the management of pension funds and mutual funds (which control a sizable percentage of the votes at most corporations stockholders meetings) may make assertion of stockholders property rights against their own corporations' management effectively impossible without some sort of government regulation--not of amounts of CEO and other top-management compensation--but of practices like golden parachutes which provide pervese incentives to CEOs to act against the interests of the stockholders, for whom they are supposedly fiduciaries.
Would you rather own stock in a company with the lowest-paid CEO or stock in a company with the highest-paid CEO?
Now that's a stupid question. I'd like stock in a promising start-up with a low-paid CEO, provided he or she and the rest of top management didn't have such huge stock options that when the company took off, my share of the profits would be diluted to suddenly pay them a windfall. I'd like stock in a company with a high-paid CEO who is actually earning his or her high pay by actually "work[ing] for [his] stockholders" like Jay Gould, by expanding profitability, so that dividends and/or share price increases give me a good return on my investment. I'd prefer having nothing to do with companies which offer golden parachute, or stock options not tied to CEO and top management performance, or stock options disproprotionately large in comparison to capitalization--unfortunately, as a very small investor who can only pursue diversification (at reasonable cost) by using mutual funds, and a pension fund beneficiary, I don't get to avoid companies which are enaging in such dilaterious executive compensation practices .
Like when Lee Iacocca took over Chrysler and accepted a $1-a-year salary, no benefits and only stock options? He ended up making over $50 million because he turned the company around and had a vested interest in doing so. Or would you rather have had stock in Mattel when Jill Barad presided over a 50 percent drop in the stock price, then walked out with a severance package of $50 million? I would rather have had the Chrysler stock thank you very much.