It's generally helpful when people see it as a choice. I suspect Mr. Kalanick does not.

The United States government treats it's citizens like the enemy.

Why on earth should we accept this situation?

Completely agree and we shouldn't accept it.

> When you have the responsibility of 1000's of people's livelihood, their paychecks rest on your hands - you don't think that's worth a heck of a lot more than an average worker?

No, this is absurd. Their paychecks don't simply rest only in the hands of the executive, but in the hands of the worker as well. I'll concede it's a more valuable position, but not 1000x or 100x or even 10x worth the value of the avg. line worker.

Taking it further, frankly most of the executives I've worked with aren't responsible at all. They're generally sociopaths as well!

The Gervais Principle holds.

you're totally free to start a few companies and pay 'fair' salary to the execs you hire

or, if an executive at some publicly-traded company is paid way over his/her value, it would mean that the company is inefficient; subsequently, you may want to invest in the competition, or short this company's stock to exploit this inefficiency

in other words, put your money on the line to prove your argument

It's a shame more HN people don't understand this. You can be pro-business and still recognise the injustice of executive salary.