Donald Trump says that CEO pay is "disgraceful".

Donald Trump ramped up his populist rhetoric Sunday, calling pay for chief executives in the United States a "complete joke." 

"It's a shame, and it's disgraceful," he told John Dickerson of CBS's "Face the Nation." " … And you see these guys making enormous amounts of money, and it's a total and complete joke."

On Sunday, Trump said he's not sure how to lower pay for CEOs, which Dickerson pointed out is about 350 times more than the average American's. 

Presumably then, Trump has been unhappy with his own salary, and remitted enough so that his own salary equaled that of his lowest paid workers, right? Probably not.

Trump's answer to this question is disturbing.  CEO's get paid a lot more than entry-level workers because they have much more valuable skills. Someone who went to business school and has 30 years experience in senior executive positions is a lot more valuable than an unskilled entry level position. Furthermore, a CEO can produce tremendously more value than an entry level position and probably can produce 350 times more value than an entry-level worker. (or even more!)  Doesn't that merit significantly higher pay? Does anyone really not believe that Steve Jobs didn't produce 350 times more value than a van driver for Apple?

Furthermore, no one is forced to pay the CEO his salary. If you don't want to contribute to a CEO's salary, don't buy a company's product or its stock upon its initial offering. No one forces you to do so.

On the other hand, we are forced to pay the sky-high salaries of government officials. There are thousands of federal government employees making six figure salaries, not counting generous pensions and benefits. It gets even worse on the state and local level. New York City's MTA pays 25% of its workers, many of whom are unskilled janitors, token booth clerks, and drivers, over $100,000 a year in base pay alone.

That is what is shameful, that is what is disgraceful, because taxpayers are forced to pay these salaries, they have no choice.

But that's not what Donald Trump talked about. You know, many people presume he's a conservative because he's a businessman who's built things. But many super-rich businessmen have a tendency to be leftist, like Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and so on. Once they've made their billions they don't feel the pinch of taxes like we do; furthermore, they can use complex trusts to avoid tax hikes, so they feel free, like Buffet, to advocate raising it on the rest of us.

Not knowing very much of Trump's political ideology, I grow uncomfortable when he bashes the capitalist system while remaining silent about the excesses of government, which has a much stronger coercive power than the biggest business in the private sector ever will.

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.