Blake Graves’s defense of the American CEO missed the central point of the article he was responding to. American CEOs make disproportionately more money than those they manage when they aren’t working that much harder. Is a life of board meetings and golf outings more strenuous than, say, machining parts or cleaning up a hospital? Not by much.

This disparity is unfair but is often rationalized by saying that these people must have made some great sacrifice to get where they are. Anybody with the intelligence to get into a university such as this should be able to see that, for the most part, the people who come to this university are the people who can afford to. Take two students of equal scholastic ability and desire to succeed, one with a CEO for a parent and one whose parents are both factory workers. Which one is more likely to live the American Dream?

Graves not only missed the central point of Futrelle’s article, but seems to have forgotten high school history also. This country may have been founded on lofty ideals, but in addition to “freedom, enterprise and deregulation” (the last of which is laughable), he missed “slavery and racial extermination.” While these events didn’t just happen in capitalist countries, the capitalist desire for cheap labor and land did nothing but encourage them here.

Jack McMillin

junior in engineering