I did not mean to imply you didn't deserve to make a good living by the way, just that if you had managed to become truly rich through failed business ventures then something was really fishy.

For the record, I'm doing well this year because I'm under a pretty good contract. Other years have been pretty dry. I got paid good at Rotary Rocket, and good salaries at the other companies I helped start. Between companies, I tightened my belt. I got a big chunk of stock out of the various companies, but none of them ended up worth the paper they were printed on. If we had been the sort of people who like to screw investors, I might have a lot more in the bank than I do now.

If some corporate executive is grossly overpaid for what he is accomplishing, that's up to the stockholders and other company officials to deal with. Not the government, or anyone else. If you pay attention to the business news, you might note that a lot of companies are clamping down on excess compensation. This is probably more due to money drying up that a sudden epiphany of some kind, but there it is. Of course, the many thousands of corporations that do not overpay their executives and also treat their employees well don't make the news very often, do they? When I worked at Rotary Rocket, everyone in the top tiers (executives, engineers, CEO) got pretty much identical salaries. The CEO made maybe three times at most what the secretary did. Of course, money was tight there, too.

Smart investors watch for overcompensation problems too. Note #7 on this list of things to look for in investments. The market handles most of this "unfairness" on its own.

At the end of the 90s, a lot of executive compensation was in the form of ballooning stock options, which also inflated the perceived value, at least before the bear market set in.

I agree with you about equality of opportunity being a benefit of living in America, but it's worth noting that the word "egalitarianism" is generally used in a context of equality of results.