We've allowed this to happen. We've become a country where wealth is considered the only indicator of worth. When the top hedge fund manager earns more in fifteen minutes than the average physician or teacher or professor does in a year, you can no longer pretend to be a country that values anything other than wealth.
Reference:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceos-vs-hedge-fund-managers-144938007.html
According to this article, the two top hedge fund managers each made $1.7 billion in 2015. If you assume a 40-hour work week and 52 weeks of work a year (i.e., no vacations), that's $817,308 an hour. Yes, you read that correctly: almost a million dollars an hour. I'm sure these people take vacations, though. And no one
really works more than 40 hours a week except for brief spurts that are difficult to maintain in the long run. So this is, if anything, a conservative calculation.
Even if we assumed that these people are so brilliant that they can be considered to be working 24 hours each day, including in their sleep, they would still be making $193,931 an hour. That's more than the average teacher, professor, or physician makes in a year.