The high cost of American executives

I have often railed against the outsize salaries of American CEOs, both for moral reasons (I have to believe Jesus would have been against it) and practical reasons (now that they want us to save their asses it's a little difficult to convince people who make less than $70k to bailout people making $10 million on average).

Anyway, here is an article by Jonathan Macy in the Wall Street Journal that backs me up on this. Obviously he is a very smart guy. His case in point is Rick Wagoner, CEO of the failing General Motors.

When Mr. Wagoner took the helm eight years ago the stock was trading at around $60 per share. The stock had fallen to around $11 per share before the current financial crisis. It's now below $5 per share.

In 2007, Mr. Wagoner's compensation rose 64% to almost $16 million in a year when the company lost billions. The board has been a staunch backer of Mr. Wagoner despite consistent erosion of market share and losses of $10.4 billion in 2005 and $2 billion in 2006. In 2007 GM posted a loss of $68.45 a share, or $38.7 billion -- the biggest ever for any auto maker anywhere.

But Wagoner is just part of a widespread problem: huge executive salaries that have no relation to performance or worth.

The average pay for chief executives of large public companies in the United States is now well over $10 million a year. Top corporate executives in the United States get about three times more than their counterparts in Japan and more than twice as much as their counterparts in Western Europe.

Anyone want to argue that Wagoner and his ilk are worth three times what the CEO of Toyota or Honda is?

besides, whatever happened to the virtues of a free market and the creative destruction of capitalism?