Compare and contrast. How did CEO’s of the Standard and Poor’s 500 companies fare last year in executive compensation, on average?

A chief executive officer of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company was paid, on average, $10.4 million in total compensation in 2008, according to preliminary data from The Corporate Library. […]

. . . CEO perks alone grew in 2008 to an average of $336,248—or nine times the median salary of a full-time worker.

And how are earnings for S&P firms doing lately? Not so good, I’m afraid.

. . . S&P 500 earnings have declined over 80% over the past 18 months, making this by far the largest decline on record (the data goes back to 1936).

Some “bitter” workers and shareholders wonder if CEOs are paid too much:

Consider the following two examples. Investors were outraged when E Trade Group Inc. disclosed it had paid out a $77 million compensation package for CEO Christos M. Cotsakos in 2001- a year in which the financial-services company lost $242 million. When Cotsakos pledged later to return $21
million, the complaints hardly subsided. In 2001 Qwest Communications posted a $4 billion loss and employees were laid off. However,Qwest’s CEO, Joseph Nacchio, received a $1.5 million bonus, $24 millions in cash, $74 million in exercised options, and was granted 7.25
million in new options. In 1980, CEO compensation was 42 times that of the average worker. In 2000, it was 531 times. […]

The truth is, however, that cutting CEO pay would be a very bad thing, indeed, according to the experts:

One risk of the plan is putting the survival of firms at risk by handcuffing their ability to pay top performers, says compensation consultant Alan Johnson. Some fear executives at banks who take TARP money will go to banks with no pay restrictions.

“The unintended consequence is you end up killing the institution you tried to save,” says Johnson. “You drive away the good people.

So what’s the obvious answer? Increase their pay of course! After all, despite all the pay raises over the last 20 years we clearly haven’t been doing enough. Just look at this chart comparing US CEO pay to the rest of the world.

Sure it looks big, and it grew substantially from 2005 until today, but if only we’d paid out even more too these highly valued employees (and less to the scumbag money grubbers who make up the bulk of most corporations’ labor force). Obviously, the top performers could see that despite the vast increases in CEO pay over the years, they were still under-compensated and taxed too much for all the hard work they put in, so they must have abandoned the work force in anticipation of Democrats winning the election in 2008. They could see the handwriting on the wall, and must have pre-emptively gone Galt leaving the field to their incompetent underlings. So you see, the Democrats are clearly to blame for the mess we are now in, because even the threat that they might win the election in 2008 (after winning so many seats in Congress in 2006) was enough to drive out the best and brightest business minds two years ago, leaving only the incompetents behind.

The solution is obvious. It isn’t cutting executive pay or increasing taxes on these super brainy executives. No, the answer is to cut taxes on the wealth producers even more than that liberal George W. Bush did, and to allow corporate boards of directors to make the decisions on how much corporate managers should be paid without interference from socialists like Obama or “shareholder activists” who don’t know anything about what it takes to run a major US corporation. Shareholders are merely owners investors after all, and whoever said corporate ownership buying shares of stock entitled anyone to a say in how a business manages its affairs obviously doesn’t understand the complexities of modern multinational corporations.

If we adopted a system where small groups of activist shareholders used the process to politicize corporate decision-making, the consequences could very well be destabilizing. Lehner warned in his statement to the House committee.

Some activist groups who disagree with corporate positions on Social Security reform, health care reform, and free trade policies, for example, seek to “super-democratize” corporations to the point of having shareholders remove directors, choose CEOs, and determine company policies and levels of pay.

[Thomas J. Lehner, director of public policy for the Washington, DC.Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of 160 leading companies] said it is important to remember the distinction between the role of shareholders and of the board.

We all agree that shareholders provide capital and in effect own companies, but the key distinction is recognizing that they don’t run them, Lehner testified. Shareholders invest in companies, profit from their growth, and in exchange for not having any liability for company actions, decision-making is necessarily left to boards and CEOs

I mean really, the nerve of some people! More democracy in decision making? More people with a say in how corporations make important decisions like who gets to run the company into the ground and how much they should be paid for the privilege? A mob of shareholders able to make better decisions about what to do than a few cronies of the current management team elite members of the board of directors? What an absurd idea!

James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized and how we live our daily lives. With seemingly boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, economic behaviorism, artificial intelligence, military history and political theory to show just how this principle operates in the real world.

Typical Marxist thinking. Thank goodness that good folks like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers are in charge or who knows what dumb ideas might get implemented by all these Liberal Fascist Obamabots.