It turns out that one of the reasons that executive compensation has been skyrocketing lately is that compensation boards game the system to maximize pay for the executives, who, after all, hired them in the first place.

Imagine that.

I would remind everyone that the pot for wages are not infinite: When they get 7 or 8 figure paychecks, it means that everyone else there gets less.

I once figured that Michael Eisner’s compensation at one point in the mid 1990s, $550,000,000.00,^* or about $73.45 a second, would have added about $6.00/hour to the pay of every Disney employee, which in turn would likely have saved money through reduced turnover.

It doesn’t matter to them though, they just want to make more than the next CEO.

^*For that, he did some rather wooden dialogue with Mickey Mouse on the Wonderful World of Disney. For that kind of money, the mouse should have been able to do him like Marlon Brando did Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris.