Intuition about fairness is not a useful guide to questions like this. It's all about the incentives and the outcomes they'll produce. I agree that the differen

Intuition about fairness is not a useful guide to questions like this. It's all about the incentives and the outcomes they'll produce. I agree that the difference in outcome between executive and worker should be smaller, but how you get there matters. One obviously wrong approach is to print money and hand it to the workers until they are all getting the same millions as the execs. This simply gets you inflation. Prices will reflect that retail clerks can now afford hundred-thousand-dollar t-shirts, and executive compensation will soar accordingly. A more subtly broken approach is to regulate wages, so that you cannot pay an executive too much or an employee too little. Blocking the transactions that would do so destroys value. In this particular case, if Sears can't get anyone to administer a controlled descent and recovery, it will crash and burn. Then a worker's risk of layoff goes from likely to guaranteed. You could imagine something similar if we heavily penalized layoffs: less risk-taking, fewer positions available in the first place. An economist would tell you to steepen the progressive tax curve and expand the EITC, or even run a Negative Income Tax that isn't conditional on work. This isn't free either, but it's generally regarded as the "least worse" option that achieves the social goal while minimizing perverse incentives. The idea of a paternal responsibility from corporation to employee is intuitive and emotionally resonant, but not necessarily useful. You can say we are socializing the costs of business's risk-taking. You can also say we are purchasing flexibility as a public good, and making a profit on the value it creates in the tax base. I'd like to see us go even further into this "corporate welfare" by eliminating the employer's healthcare obligations in favor of a public option.