Look up mondragon Spain. Its a town in Spain whose economy was struggling after WWII. They turned it around by adopting a cooperative business model. This means all employees are owners.

All employees get to vote how the company operates. Executives work for share holders right? With cooperatives, the share holders are employees creating a business Ouroboros where the boss and their boss have an interest in keeping employees Happy. Employees are invested in keeping the company profitable.

They have padded rules like CEO pay is tied to the lowest salary in the company. It can never be more than X amount of the lowest salary. If they want it to raise they have to increase all salaries in the company first.

They don't get filthy stinking rich. But what they have shown is that the people living there score happier than most. They also show that they are economically more resilient. For close to a 100 years they have withstood recessions and economic down turns.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/07/mondragon-spains-giant-cooperative

In addition to Mondragon, look into co-determination laws in places like Germany, where they have profit sharing, and a certain % of a company's board needs to be made up of actual workers.

This can be done.

I stand by my opinion that CEO pay should be pegged to the “lowest” employee on the totem pole

And congressman/representative salary should be pegged to minimum wage.

Why?

You've use the word "should", which means you're applying a value judgement. On what metrics are you basing this value judgment? Does a company perform better using this guideline? Do they lower any risks? Does this increase retention? Improve cross-team communication? Reduce waste or losses?

While I also personally think these salaries are insane, without answering about a thousand more similar questions, there's no justification for the metric you've provided.

Another way to look at it: if a company could hire someone for less, and get similar results, wouldn't they?

How much of that success was a direct result of the CEO, though? The more time goes on, the more any company depends on the historic collective achievement of humanity. The company couldn't have succeeded at all without an educated workforce, infrastructure, "the economy", or a million other general social, economic, and political factors completely outside the company's control.

Think of it like this... Most of math as we know it, and by extension computer science, wouldn't exist without Euler. Does that mean Euler, or Euler's children, should own all value generated by Euler's math? How about if he started a company that copyrighted those algorithms? All tech companies in perpetuity? How about the VC that conducted the hostile takeover with other people's money? Should the CEO who leads the robotics company that replaces the human workforce, rule ALL of humanity for the remainder of eternity?

Even though my examples are fucking ridiculous, the way the world actually works is that any CEO who started an ultimately successful company, regardless of whether or not they were pivotal or hindered the company, and even average executives who jumped in for a year just before IPO, frequently end up wealthier than hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people — wealthier than entire nation states — weather than people who had many orders of magnitude more influence in the success of the company than they ever did...

Ultimately, no matter how much you do or achieve individually, human civilisation and all its achievements could not exist without the collective effort of billions of people (and counting). In the grand scheme of things every hot shot CEO is just an inevitable statistic fulfilling a role that someone else would have fulfilled if they had never been born.

Yeah, until we find out it doesn't when they inevitably get hacked. Like the credit reporting agencies. I'm sure those CEOs were (and still are) doing just fine.