America still clings, often subconsciously to the Calvinistic notion that wealth is an “outward sign of inner grace”. We still believe against all evidence that people who are wealthy are somehow morally superior to the rest of us 99%

As it was pointed out upthread, it is possible at best to only estimate a particular individual’s share of a company’s profits. But we have decided that salary is some sort of objective hierarchy and that our CEO’s are just hundreds and hundreds of times more useful than their underlings.

We had the Best and Brightest running our investment banks and Wall Street. Or perhaps not, perhaps we should have paid them more and they would have been more motivated to do a better job…