The following is an editorial that appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on October 25, 2002. What follows is a response written by me that was published on November 9. Pay According to baseball lore, when told that he made more money than the President of the United States, Babe Ruth cracked, "I had a better year." The Washington Post recently reported: "In 1960, the average head of a top company made twice as much money as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, according to one study. Today's top chief executives earn more than 60 times as much as President Bush. In 1980, on average, the CEOs of the biggest U.S. companies were paid 40 times as much as hourly wage-earners at their companies. Now that number is approaching 500 times as much." Regarding extravagant pay, "earned" may be the great misnomer. Recent months have seen spectacular bankruptcies and failures - attributed sometimes to general economic conditions, sometimes to mismanagement and corruption. Many of the notable crashes featured celebrated swanks who won kudos and pocketed many millions. Enron supposedly was run by geniuses and whiz kids. During the bubble years - when anyone could pick a soaring stock - the financial world teemed with highly paid experts who knew everything. When picking winners grew more difficult, the same masters of the universe were revealed as mortal. (They still make more than the minimum wage.) The business world has its all-pros, its hall-of-famers, its Babes. Their numbers are relatively few. If corporate success depended on superstar talent at the top, then corporate success would prove more elusive. For all the hoopla attending his tenure at GE, Jack Welch was nei- ther an Einstein - nor a Unitas. Mega-salaries reflect neither necessity nor reality. As the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York says, lavish executive compensation is "terribly bad social policy and perhaps even bad morals." Editor, Times Dispatch: Your Oct. 25 editorial “Pay” makes a mockery of the virtuous capitalists who run our nation’s corporations. You focused on the small number of corporations that failed because of a handful of dishonest men who relied on fraud instead of their intellects. Perhaps a better title for your editorial would have been “Duty”. You deplore “the terribly bad social policy” of corporations paying their executives what they feel they are worth. “Social policy” is the equivalent of the equally subjective “public good,” which is the philosophy of sacrifice to the state that created both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. A corporation’s only “duty” is to its shareholders, not to egalitarianism in pay between the clerk who sorts the mail and a CEO like Jack Welch, who increased the value of G.E.’s stock by almost 3000 percent. The Times Dispatch editorial department is often labeled as conservative. However, the belief in a duty to other men is the key similarity between conservatism and liberalism. Both of these political philosophies view altruism and service to the state as ultimate values (conservatives embrace compulsory service and the draft while liberals support punitive taxes on productive achievement). The truly ultimate value is that which our nation was founded upon: The radical idea of the self-interested individual pursuing his own happiness while keeping the property that he has honestly earned. -Bob Murphy Richmond, Va