The guy at McDonalds makes $6 an hour.
Let's say the lawyer makes $200 an hour. Does his work produce 33 times more than the McDonald's worker?
Of course the lawyer is not 33 times more productive, but due to skill level one productive hour of one persons work may indeed be valued at 33 times a much lower skilled persons.
That said, most McDonald's workers make a little more than your example and most lawyers don't make anything like $200/hr. Although the average attorney may bill at $200/hr that doesn't mean they are making $200/hr.
Regardless, a pay scale ranging from $6/hr to $200/hr is not out of any reasonable norm and even one who makes $200 per hour is not rich by any means.
What I find disgusting is a society that finds a wage disparity of wage multipliers in the THOUSANDS is in any way "normal" or acceptable. Sure, a really hard worker may can be several times more productive than a slack worker, and a really smart worker may be worth what dozens or even hundreds of dumb workers are worth. But most surely, even the smartest, hardest working, person in the universe can not justify a wage of thousands of times the average worker.
There is just no way that someone making $50,000,000 a year is worth what 1,250 average workers are worth. No one is 1,250 times smarter or faster than the average person. If they were, that one person could perform every bit of work required to maintain a small town (like a town of 5,000 people). Clean every toilet, build every building, manufacture every item used (including the bricks in the buildings), doctor and laywer every citizen, sell every item sold, stock every shelf, clean every street, cook every meal. Thats most definately a senerio that I do not find plausable.
At some point on the wage scale, people are recieving an income that they do not earn and can not be justified economically. Cronieism, corruption, fraud, luck, and inheritance explains 99% of outrageous income disparity.
