Welcome to the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 6th. I'm Anastasia Yuglova, your host.

For yesterday's episode, senior fellow Jagadiche Gokley explained his position on executive pay,

arguing that how much CEOs take home is nobody's business but the shareholders.

Today, managing editor of Regulation magazine Tom Fiery adds his own two cents to the debate

over how much executives should be paid by the firms they lead.

Scholars Jagadish Gokley and Jerry Taylor recently wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing

that CEO pay need not be capped.

Do you have anything to add to that argument?

Well, I have some disagreements with it, and I'm uncomfortable with that because, first of all,

I'm a huge fan of Jogadish's work and I challenge him with great

reputation and I'm a fan of Jerry's work and challenge him as well but I want to pick a couple

quibbles with things that they said the first thing they argued is that we should pay

CEOs more than we do now and that that would somehow be better for workers.

I think they're incorrect with that. The second is they claim that there's no public

policy issue with CEO pay and I think they're wrong with that too.

But the reason I think they're wrong in both of those is going to be different than what most people out there talking about social justice, why they argue that it's wrong.

I want to submit that CEO pay is absolutely no different than pay for any other worker

anywhere else on the wage scale.

So from the guy at the lowest level, the guy in the middle level, the low level managers all the way up,

they are paid in accordance with what other people with the same skills would be willing to take.

It's all competition at various skill levels, plus there might be some sort

of a premium put on top of that to encourage good behavior, kind of an anti-shirking

...