What exactly does it mean to say that someone "deserves" their salary?

After all, if they really weren't worth it, nobody would pay them that much. If they are getting paid that much...the person paying them may be a fool, but are apparently a fool willing to pay.

Where does "deserve" even belong in the discussion?

Don't forget that class action lawyers are an important mechanism for forcing corporate responsibility. In the absence of government regulation, they are the ONLY check on corporate irresponsibility.

Yes, but if they're taking home that significant a portion of the corporate penalties, the system is broken. That money should be redressing the harm caused by said corporation, not enriching the lawyers.


It means that their renumeration is warranted by their production. Given that we don't have a massive upswing of general good for the nation going on - middle-class jobs increasing, "real" wages increasing, trade balances tipping in our favour, national debt reducing, public health improving - the activities of no man in this country warrants such enormous renumeration.

We're now on page 11; this discussion needs to be moved to a new thread, or dropped for a while, as the POOP moderators judge.

Booya to that! I want to be renumerated. I think I'd like to be 867-5309!

I'm fond of the number 24601 myself.

Again, I believe that if you came by the money legally, you should be able to keep at least some of it.

Should it be legal for a lawyer, who suffered no personal mishap himself, to skim 10% off the top of a corporate settlement?

Remuneration has never been based on productivity.

If some make enormous salaries, it's because some others think it's worth the cost of paying them - probably as a return on investment.

The idea of a "just wage" is medieval. Wages are the price of labor. They're subject to the exact same price underlying reality as every other price.


Given that the people who hired him knew that's what would happen...why should they have any right to complain? Besides that, if they lost the class action suit, that lawyer gets stuck with no compensation and probably all the costs as well. Seems like a fair compensation for the risk involved.

Especially since, without a lawyer, they wouldn't have been able to win, or even engage in, a lawsuit.

Two things.

$10 million doesn't go as far as it used to.

John Rockefeller was the richest American (at the time of his death) per CNNs calculation. He had 1.4 billion. Bill Gates has less of the total GDP of the U.S than Rockefeller had, measured by wealth/gdp. But his wealth last year was measured at $82 Billion.

Once you cap earnings at $10 million a year you change up a lot of incentives. A lot of lotteries would go broke.

But I do hate these class action lawsuits where the lawyers get millions and the consumers get petty little coupons for a product from the company that screwed them in the first place.