We will invent narratives to protect our ego and will happily keep other people down (including ourselves) instead of confronting this.
"He just got promoted because he's more outgoing, he's not more talented than me!"
Ok let's assume thats true. But if your job involves spending 40 hours a week with someone (more than your family), it turns out humans value being around charming, outgoing people. Is this wrong or is it the market accurately assessing relative value in the context of the actual work (collaborating with other humans)?
Mediocre and average employees like the idea of reducing inequality, because the mediocre employees stand to financially benefit and the average employees can expect little to no change in compensation while reaping emotional rewards.
For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.
Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality.
Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others. If you want to pay someone outside of band, give them a different title.
If someone performs unexpectedly well, give them a bonus/promotion etc.
It's deeply sad (but unsurprising) that so many people can only focus on their particular benefit (especially when the vast majority of that benefit is context dependent).
Like, if you hired John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard and just told them to take tickets, they'd probably be an average performer at best. If you told them never to take initiative, they'd perform badly. So lots of performance is dependent on context, there are very few "good" employees in a vacuum.
No its not. This is a skill that is useful when exchanging value with other entities (the basis of the economy). You're being compensated for having that skill.
Would you hire a salesperson or head of procurement or media buyer with bad negotiation skills? How about a developer who can't properly negotiate with teams demanding their time to properly allocate themselves where needed?
The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.
It goes other way round too. It might just be that the your higher salary is not rational, you got lucky or got unfair advantage.
Like, in the bottom of your comment, you made up situation that might just not apply. Or might just not counteract anything
Or, might be directly damaging - agreeing with everyone makes you popular, but causes a lot of damage in the long term. Lying about important stuff makes you popular, but causes damage to company and everyone else.
People go out of their way to rationalize and defend unfair or damaging systems.
So it's far more likely these comments are over-indexing on the "its all luck/unfairness" explanation than the "it's all rational" explanation given there's 100X more people who will have their egos protected by the former positioning (the ratio of executives to worker bees is like 1:100).