This conversation has happened many times on this forum and no one has ever actually shown how the salary of a CEO hurts anyone or encroaches on anyone's freedom.
It's not that CEOs get paid too much, it's that the small worker gets paid too little. Income inequality. It's possible to address by either limiting top pay or paying the small worker more.
I would add to this that I don't think most of us (or at least myself) are arguing for a "limit" on pay so much as rules and incentives that would encourage corporations to reduce pay. An outright limit would be too easy to work around.
And yes, there is very good reason to believe that income inequality is detrimental to society.
Im not even arguing for that. I'm suggesting incentivize companies to pay the little worker more. Really what I'm saying is we move from the philosophy that says "it's a corporations duty to maximize profits for shareholders" to the philosophy that says "it's a corporation's duty to maximize benefits for society". I suggested earlier by doing that thru the corporate tax codes. If a company doesn't pollute, is carbon neutral, creates a good amount of wealth all around, pays women the same as men for the same work, is inclusive, etc, they shouldn't pay any tax at all. The more a company doesn't do those things, the higher their taxes.
Your criteria are very subjective and involving the government via the corporate tax structure would only complicate things. I think the better option would be for people to vote with their dollars by only buying products, and investing in, companies that meet their criteria.
I agree with you, it would be ideal if this worked. Sadly, it doesn't seem to in real life.
If you're barely scraping by and need to buy bread for your family, you're going to buy the cheapest bread. Even if the leader of the company that makes that bread says 'Poor people are all assholes, we exploit them whenever possible.' If you're middle class and need to buy bread for your family, you're probably going to buy the cheapest bread. Why would you care about the exploitation of the poor? If you're extremely wealthy your servants likely bake you fresh bread every morning, so you don't matter in this discussion.
You couple with the above phenomenon the fact that most companies are pretty good at hiding when they do bad things and that the average poor person doesn't have time or resources to do exhaustive research on the companies (and the larger mega-corporations that own them), and you start to realize that the free market is tends to be a total failure in this area.