How Much Should Corporate Executives Be Paid?

In the editorial "Executive Pay and Civic Culture," Jan. 14, a justification is made for multimillion-dollar salaries and bonuses for CEOs by comparing them with those of some NBA basketball team members. While I would not try to justify the ballplayers' pay, I wonder how long they'd receive it after a few years of losing performance?

Our Big Three auto executives get raises after 10 years of failure to anticipate the requirements for competing with the Japanese - but does saving last year's disaster from being worse justify a raise? I wonder if there aren't actually a number of much lower-paid managers out there who could have done a much better job. Paul March, Seattle

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