I never said it was okay for Amiercan taxpayers to pick up the tab for all those "capitolistic" (actually cronyist, IMHO) companies that were going under. IIRC, many advocates for government intervention in the economy were saying that bailout was necessary. It wasn't, and any such bailout must lead to perverse results, just like I predicted.
Why is it okay to pay Walmart executive so much more than Walmart associates? Because the alternative is not a big happy family singing kumbalaya, but a government owned distribution network like Egypt has (if we are lucky, or what North Korea has if we are not). The real power that Mike Duke has is not the $20mil that he and his wife (mostly his wife) gets to decide on what gardener, chef and baby sitter to have, and where to get takeouts or dry cleaning. The real power Mike Duke has is in how the hundreds of billions of dollars that consumers spend in Walmart Stores get channeled towards production. Someone has to make those decisions. Would you like to have other places like Target to shop if Mike Duke screws up, or would you like Walmart being the only store in America and Mike Duke collects only $300k like Obama does, and have the government pay for his wife's helpers in other ways? Obviously, Mike Duke and Obama are too busy to cook their own dinners everyday, and their wives are too busy keeping their husbands happy to do anything more than symbolic gardening.
The alternative to letting market place deciding resource allocation (including how much CEO's get paid) is not less concentration of wealth and power, but far greater concentration of wealth and power through cronyism like what the most regulated industry (banking and mortgage lending) has become.
Market Data 
Markets 
