some jobs pay more now, but they also deserve it as a general rule based on the basic rules of supply and demand and fair compensation for increased responsibilities and the associated accountability...
Since when have people ever been paid for responsibility or accountability? That's a crock of shit.
There is a municipal engineer who tests your drinking water every day. He makes about $85k/year, and if he screws up then literally millions of people will die. He has more real responsibility than virtually anyone else in the country, but he's not paid for it.
I work an office building where I sit at a computer and wiggle my fingers all day over a keyboard. There are other people who wiggle their fingers in my same building for approximately 25% of what I make, and there are people who wiggle their fingers for twice what I make. It's not like you can tell who works the hardest based on their paycheck, or who is the most dependable, or who has the most work stress or responsibility, or even who has the most specialized skill set. Mostly, the size of a particular person's paycheck corresponds with the sizes of the paychecks of the other people they communicate with, and not with the actual work they do or the topic of their communication.
In pretty much any given large company, the regional manager gets paid more than the district manager because they have more responsibility, not because their job is harder. The district manager gets paid more than the store manager because they have more responsibility and accountability. The regional manager's boss similarly gets paid more because they have more responsibility. The exceptions to this are the stupid and the ignorant that take on more responsibility without demanding to be compensated appropriately. As job duties and responsibility increase, people generally get compensated more for that.
That municipal water chem tech taking samples each day (or one of many people doing so for larger municipalities) actually has little real responsibility. He's responsible to do a test (or in many cases, just gets the results of the water tests) and then do what he's told to do based on the results (nothing, tell someone, take a specific set of actions, etc). He isn't responsible for much at all really, despite the potential for negative consequences if he screws up and can't follow the relatively simple requirements of his job. If he screws up, AND some other stuff other people are responsible for screws up (the systems that make the water safe), AND the systems put into place to back them up fails (generally automated testing and alarms are put in place), THEN some people MAY have some problems for a period of time, most of which would be "inconvenient" rather than "significant in the grand scheme of things". For most such places, he screws up and there's no impact at all since it's unlikely all the other failures necessary for it to actually impact anything would happen at the same time. In fact, if he didn't test the water for a week the most likely result would be "an audit says he screwed up and maybe he loses his job".
If the CEO of GE (for example) screws up badly enough, the company fails (like say, Lehman Bros), then hundreds of thousands of workers lose their jobs, millions of investors lose their money, the economy of the US and the world are negatively impacted causing hardship to billions of people.
So, a global economic problem with hundreds of thousands of immediate potential job losses because a CEO's direction causes a company to fail vs "if some other stuff also goes wrong, then maybe a few thousand people are temporarily inconvenienced, call it a few hundred thousand if it's a large city AND IF the equipment isn't doing it's job properly AND all the other guys doing the same job screw up AND their bosses don't notice AND the water plant operators screw up and don't notice the systems not working properly".
Personally, I'd say the guy who can cause the global economic problems responsibility is a bit higher than the guy testing the water for the city.
Now, that's not to say that people ALWAYS get more pay for more responsibility. Change companies and the pay may be different (higher or lower) even if the responsibility is the same. Change regions and the pay will likely change as well (Higher COL areas tend to pay relatively lower salaries adjusted for cost of living for instance). Change countries and you can count on the pay changing. Then there are the people who don't know their own worth and accept more and more responsibility without ever negotiating/demanding more pay (employers love these idiots, willing to do more work and take on more responsibilities without having to get paid more is great for the bottom line, even though you know they're probably not bright enough to promote much farther).
It's also not to say that responsibility or accountability are the ONLY things that determine pay. The laws of supply and demand (fewer qualified individuals with lots of openings generally means more pay for instance) also hold true and the relative value of the work done matters (tons of artists, but few are selling painting for 5 or 6-figure sums because the market doesn't value most that highly).
For the record, however, I think objective data on pay should be included somewhere, so though it isn't relevant to the quoted post, I'll point this out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics regarding executive (including chief executive) pay:
The median annual wage for general and operations managers was $99,310 in May 2016.
The median annual wage for chief executives was $181,210 in May 2016.
Now, that "median" pay CEO making $181,210/yeah isn't making 300x what the lowest paid worker is getting working full time since none of the full-time workers in the US are earning $604/year.... despite how much some people think every CEO is making.