Speaking as someone who is also familialy-related to a neonatologist and a cardiologist -- both of whom earn more than a few million per year, I'd say they deserve every last dollar of it. They had to go to school for some while, and work under very tiring schedules. Hell, their schedules are still to this day pretty sucky -- they often tell me how much they envy me for my startup I'll-do-whatever-I-want-whenever-I-want lifestyle.
I think they both earn somewhere between 2 to 5 mil/year, but they spend it extravagantly and handsomely -- that's a very good thing. They're spending it on boats, cars, houses, nannies, restaurants, vacations, etc. etc. They're keeping the money going, they're spreading it out. They save lives, get money, and then help the economy by spending this money.
Now, what IS shameful is what the salaries of these social-app CEOs are. Why is Zuck worth some 20 BILLION? He's just going to sit on it, unlike my uncles he's not going to spend the majority of it. Zuck isn't helping the economy, Uber isn't helping the economy (it's externalizing costs, privatizing profits -- if they didn't exist that'd be a good thing). What is shameful is the profiting from rent-seeking, from making a killing on capital gains, etc. etc. Getting a few million per year isn't that bad, because believe it or not, in the large scheme of things that's little money -- most importantly, it's money that one can realistically spend from year to year. Spending a billion -- that's a challenge.
Why is Zuck worth $28.8 billion? Private property rights and a tremendous success. How do you know he's just going to sit on it? You don't, which null and voids your entire premise.
Spreading money out, ie redistribution of previously existing funds through service based consumption industries, is a very mediocre example of "keeping the economy going." Production is what bolsters an economy, not consumption. The faltering US economy has been demonstrating how that works in practice for decades, while China's production-centric economy demonstrated the exact opposite (and the same principle that the US economy was originally built on: production creates wealth, consumption destroys wealth, which is easy to deduce logically).
And sitting on wealth is a tremendously benevolent thing: it removes that purchasing power from circulation, boosting the net purchasing power of every other person holding, for example, dollars. If Zuck puts his $28.8 billion in a bank account, it does two wonderful things for the economy: it becomes available to be lent out by the bank in question, to help fund businesses or similar, and it temporarily removes $28.8 billion worth of dollars from the economy, increasing what other people's dollars can buy.
You're worrying about the wrong things. The problem here is not the pay of heart surgeons and neonatologists, the problem is with insurance companies, our healthcare system, etc. etc. Focus directly on fixing those issues, large salaries for surgeons is only a red herring.
But large incomes for people like Zuck is a problem. That makes no sense to me.
I think they both earn somewhere between 2 to 5 mil/year, but they spend it extravagantly and handsomely -- that's a very good thing. They're spending it on boats, cars, houses, nannies, restaurants, vacations, etc. etc. They're keeping the money going, they're spreading it out. They save lives, get money, and then help the economy by spending this money.
Now, what IS shameful is what the salaries of these social-app CEOs are. Why is Zuck worth some 20 BILLION? He's just going to sit on it, unlike my uncles he's not going to spend the majority of it. Zuck isn't helping the economy, Uber isn't helping the economy (it's externalizing costs, privatizing profits -- if they didn't exist that'd be a good thing). What is shameful is the profiting from rent-seeking, from making a killing on capital gains, etc. etc. Getting a few million per year isn't that bad, because believe it or not, in the large scheme of things that's little money -- most importantly, it's money that one can realistically spend from year to year. Spending a billion -- that's a challenge.