Wlady, while I agree with many of the criticisms leveled at Huckabee on the blog here today, I think Jonathan Chait needs to brush up on his business history. Saying that Sam Walton’s “salary surely qualified as immoral if anybody’s ever did” is an utterly ignorant statement. Far from taking an exorbitant salary, Walton was legendary for never taking a salary above $350,000–a paltry amount compared to CEOs at other large corporations. The idea was to instill a culture of keeping costs low to pass on savings to consumers (he also was known for wearing inexpensive clothes). Walton’s tremendous wealth came from owning a large percentage of stock in the company that he built from the ground up. If that is Chait’s idea of immoral, then words have no meaning.
