Because they can...

Kevin Drum has a follow-up post on executive compensation that you should read, but I will give you one of the most important points here:

CEOs aren't paid astronomical salaries because of market forces. They're paid astronomical salaries because they can get away with it. That's all.

And that's the way it is with a lot of aspects of capitalism... the right crows about how the left will never be taken seriously on terrorism until such-and-such happens; well, the right should never be taken seriously on the economy until they recognize that some regulation is quite healthy for the market and for our society...

Update: Atrios writes some notes on free trade that are better than what I could ever put together in such a short post (But what do you expect? He's the economist, not me...)