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?