I disagree with you for the most part. Using your example, as CEO of company with 42,000 employees, I earned an average compensation of nearly $750K/year.
But most of that was performance based. So, I earned around $7 per employee per year (less than half a penny an hour per employee). The rest was earned as a percentage of the company's appreciating value which effectively is taken out of the "owner's pocket"... from their profits. Keep in mind, our profit margins were around 2%, so don't say we were gouging the public.
People running small companies made far less than I did in the same industry. But were making far more per employee. So were they gouging their employees even after making far less? My company did have to support more layers of overhead than the smaller company, but everyone earned a competitive salary to the industry and our employees tended to get better benefits.
Where I do agree with you, in most cases overpaid professions tend to be disintermediated by new business models. At the same time, technology has made it easy far easier for someone to become incredibly wealthy. People like me, while highly compensated (though I started out working at $3.50/hour), whether I was earning $3.50 an hour or $375/hour were selling our time along with some results-based bonuses.
Today, the way to make a fortune is to sell IP (intellectual property). Whether that takes the form of books (like Harry Potter), software (like Google) or electric cars (like Tesla). If you can sell your IP within a product to the world, you have potentially 9 billion customers who don't care about your time, they just want your idea. You won't close the gap with these ultra-rich, because if you don't want to pay them for their idea someone else in the world will and incorporate it into a product.
Consider if someone invents a medication to cure cancer with a pill, that pill can be produced in American or Europe or Asia. If the inventor decides he wants $50 per person treated with his invention, some international pharma company will pay him the $50 to license his formula.
If it is used to cure 2 million people annually, the inventor earns $100 million a year. But society would save billions upon billions. Is it bad, the guy earned $100 million a year? Aren't people better off? Will his success convince others to devote their lives to inventing cures for other issues?
As long as compensation is market based, it tends to work out over time. But when you artificially boost compensation even when its low, you trigger alternatives as you point out. Unions triggered the migration of jobs to Mexico and China (the workers were not paid huge salaries, just overpaid to market). In California, increasing minimum wage to $15/hour has led to a whole redesign of the restaurant industry virtually eliminating traditional servers. Are the servers that lost their "underpaid" jobs better off being unemployed?
The government will pay physicians based on the procedures they perform as much as 10X different even though their education is roughly the same. I ran a physician company where my top physician earned $1 million a year and my lowest paid physician earned around $175K. Compensation tied to various factors including the value the government assigned to the various procedures they did. So not even "regulated" salaries for work requiring a similar education "works".
While you view highly paid people as overpaid, but the truth is some are, and some are not. But it is also true, of low paid people. Some are overpaid and some are not. The issue is not how much someone is paid, but whether that rate is somehow linked to the value they create.
Your thoughts on compensation remind me at some level of 16th century Japanese thinking. They valued farmers and artisans above merchants because farmers and artisans created something with their hands, and merchants simply sold what other people made for a profit. Merchants were their society's "vampires".
But even in that society, the merchants while look down upon, made the money because one person can only produce so much... but a merchant can sell what hundreds of farmers produce and artisans create and even at a small markup make a lot more income. So a society whose values aligned with idea of making stuff... couldn't get their compensation system to work to reflect it.
