Keep reading a verse or two. With men it is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

You bring up a good point about what it takes to be rich. Simply being born in America is like hitting the lottery. Very few in the US would have much of a leg to stand if they claim not to be rich if they are judged not by NYC or SFO standards, but by world standards–much less the standards of history, in which no generation that has ever lived has had it so easy materially.

In fact, it is probably much smaller than the number of companies… my observation, as someone who has worked for large company for many years, is that many executives have NO IDEA how to really run a company… they come in, change the org chart around to make it look like they’re doing something, and then move on to the next position after 2-3 years, before anyone can tell whether the changes they made were a good thing or not. But we are stuck paying these fakes the same big salaries as all the other guys, most of which are largely unjustified, or unable to be justified because you can’t judge the real performance after only 2-3 years.

Yes, you could. But that is not precisely what I see going on in our current situation. I see a kind of stigmatizing that amounts to despising. In fact, whether or not it ought to be possible, I can’t think of any situation in which a society has managed to broadly stigmatize an undesirable behavior without it turning into most people feeling justified in despising those who do it. Single motherhood would be a good example — there have always been those who have sought to have compassion for those in such situations, but generally speaking social stigma has equaled a fairly bitter social condemnation and a perceived license to despise unwed mothers.

I don’t at all mean to suggest that therefore we shouldn’t take a negative position toward that which is clearly immoral, but it seems to me that it gets pretty tricky to justify “social stigma” without justifying some sort of uncharitable behavior, which is just as forbidden as the sin we want to criticize. I think there is an important distinction between strongly denouncing sins, and encouraging public deprecation of all particular sinners.

This is false. While Krugman uses well-known CEOs in his examples, the article is really about this:

“For at least the past 15 years it has been hard to deny the evidence for growing inequality in the United States. Census data clearly show a rising share of income going to the top 20 percent of families, and within that top 20 percent to the top 5 percent, with a declining share going to families in the middle. Nonetheless, denial of that evidence is a sizable, well-financed industry.”

Nowhere does Krugman specify that he is only talking about the CEOs of the largest corporations. He does mention them as part of the introduction to the article in reference to those well-known CEOs, but the economic data following covers a far wider group who are continuing to rise and create greater inequality.

He goes on to say:

“The C.B.O. study found that between 1979 and 1997, the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of families rose 157 percent, compared with only a 10 percent gain for families near the middle of the income distribution”

The incomes of the 1% start at $386,000 dollars. The average income of the 99%–99.9% is $717,000.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/30/nyregion/where-the-one-percent-fit-in-the-hierarchy-of-income.html

You are restricting your analysis to a very specific group at the top of the chain. Although Krugman does point out the disproportionally of growth continues as you continue to move up the ladder, he regularly uses the 1% in the article.

This points the finger at the executives that I mention. The 99.0%–99.9% group makes, on average, three times that of the 90%–99% and twenty times the bottom 90%. And, while the 1%, which…

Personally I think accumulations of wealth are godly when they’re well stewarded, but you can disagree with that position without necessarily falling into pride or envy.

You’re taking outlier cases to prove a point about about executive compensation. This is a weak argument.

Yes. Very few people have the ability to run the world’s largest corporations. This does not alter the fact that executives in average companies and corporations are getting compensated well above their staff even though their expertise, education, and product knowledge is often much less critical to productivity. This is the the typical executive. This is not Tim Cook, but Tim Jones who runs an organization with less than 500 employees and cuts jobs and outsources labor while in order to cut costs by maintains a salary many times his average staff.

Tim Jones is typically not a superstar. He usually didn’t create any product. He is a business school graduate with an MBA who has moved up the corporate ladder typically by changing from company to company often switching fields, because the actual product doesn’t matter as much as maintaining dramatically high rates of profitability regardless of the effect of those rates on employees.

I am not at all convinced that these executives deserve the level of compensation that they receive.