Barack Obama, following the lead of Rep. Barney Frank, wants to make corporations to give their shareholders a say in executive pay packages. He has introduced a bill that would guarantee shareholders the right to an advisory, non-binding vote on executive compensation. Senators Clinton and Edwards quickly signed on as cosponsors. Is soaring CEO pay a ripe issue for presidential politics?

If so, let’s hope it gets debated with at least a touch of logic. The Frank-Obama initiatives are much less than meets the journalistic eye, since non-binding votes are symbolic: Washington, DC, for example, has a non-binding vote in Congress. Still, when legislators start prescribing special shareholder democracies for one kind of management decision but not others, the public should be concerned: politicizing corporate policy is seldom good for the most vital public concerns—job creation, profit-generation, and innovations that make life better.

That said, no doubt Sen. Obama is on to a sensitive subject in the body politic. High-profile “farewell gifts” or “golden parachutes” for sometimes marginally effective corporate leaders ($212 million to Bob Nardelli of Home Depot, recently) make folks think something is wrong in the way our free economy divvies up the economic pie. That’s a very corrosive concern and needs to be taken seriously.

But to deal effectively with such an appearance of unfairness, a cool-headed appraisal of facts is the first order of business. Corporate CEOs are not the only high-profile beneficiaries of huge pay windfalls. Consumers of goods from the late Elvis Presley ($42 million in annual income), 50 Cent ($41 million), Nicole Kidman ($22 million), Katie Couric ($15 million), and Tom Cruise ($67 million) don’t seem to arouse the same kind of moral outrage some citizens direct towards top CEOs. What is it about corporate and financial types that make them an object of such greater envy?

Statist-type liberals, those who see any social imperfection as cause for expanding state power, would say it’s the fundamental inequality of the thing: I, she, and we work hard for our pay, and know damn well no corporate maven works that much harder than us. Ipso facto, it’s not fair—the system is skewed against us. By contrast, top film actors, pop musicians, and athletes are people of whom we say, “I could never do what they do.” The average Joe doesn’t see himself in competition with top entertainers—and doesn’t see them as ‘bosses’ with any leverage over the typical working person.

As psychology that’s not bad, yet it conflates one type of egalitarianism (equality of result) with the more properly American version: equality of opportunity. Deep down, resentment of exorbitant pay for the cream of American business stems from a feeling that the game is fixed, that the winners win because they have had unfair advantages all along.

Politicizing corporate policy is seldom good for the most vital public concerns—job creation, profit-generation, and innovations that make life better.

Indeed there may be something to that. In the 21^st century mixed economy, who you know makes more of a difference than ever. Political access—whether personal and direct, or bought-and-paid-for—can make a big difference to the corporate bottom line: May I have my antitrust exemption, please? Or, that fellow’s spinach is making people sick—why don’t you shut him down and leave the field to me? Corporate boards are rife with politicos, ex-politicos, and people who know people who are prominent in politics. Even outside the corporation, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and wheeler-dealers of all stripes rely on access to both politicians and their own peers in corporate American to win massive payouts. Business Week reports the top hedge funds and private investment firms have returned over 50% per year lately.

Whether the answer to all this is another (albeit timid) layer of government intervention a la Frank & Obama is a fair question. If excessive intimacy among investment gurus, corporations, and government power-players is causing the problem, why create more incentives for such intimacy?

Ultimately, the answer to public disenchantment with “capitalist excess” is limiting government power over economic activity, demanding more of corporate boards that oversee compensation matters, and disclosure, disclosure, disclosure—something hampered, not aided, by absurdly complex rules embedded in the tax code, the securities laws, and campaign finance regimes, among others. Fairness, or the appearance of fairness, is a hard thing for government to deliver when mediating economic relationships. There is too much risk of undermining the aspirational part of the American experience, the natural partner to equality-of-opportunity. Simplicity and openness from government, vigilant shareholders, and a much better class of economic journalism: all these are more effective remedies for the gross excesses of the marketplace. As they would be an aid to good government.

George A. Pieler is Senior Fellow with the Institute for Policy Innovation. Jens F. Laurson is Editor-in-Chief of the International Affairs Forum.