The left has a small but potent hand of cards from which it plays the one (sometimes ones) that are best calculated to help it get the government interventionism it wants. There is the race card. The climate fear card. There are a few others, but the one I want to talk about is the envy card. Leftists know that envy is a powerful motive in people and they never hesitate to appeal to it.

A case in point is the current flap over executive compensation. A lefty group has been shouting and banging pitchforks over a recent factoid to the effect that the pay for top CEOs is 431 times as great as for “working class” people.

Gosh! We’d better do something!

But not so fast. Cato’s reliable baloney terminator Alan Reynolds takes a careful look at this factoid here and finds that the truth is getting stomped on.

Besides, even if some CEOs are paid too much — which is probably true — it does not follow that the “workers” are paid too little. The people who are getting “ripped off” are the stockholders. It’s their earnings per share figure that is whittled down by overstuffed pay envelopes for the CEO.