A question posted at Yahoo! Answers:

Is the USA the capital of greed?
“I can not believe anyone need as much $ as our CEOs.”

My response (slightly edited):

Since when is it about “need”?  I had hoped to see total demise of Karl Marx and Keynes. Googling [USA "capital of greed"] brought only about 20 returns, none stating the USA, a couple of pointers for each of New York, Las Vegas, and London, and one muddled article which I think meant to accuse Australia.So the answer to your question is “NO”. However, it appears you were trying to make some issue about “greed”. I’ve heard such jabber too often, which is my reason for taking this on.

So Googling [definition greed] returned an amazing 405,000 entries; the best (to me) appearing within the first 50 was
“Contrary to popular belief, there is no set definition of greed. From economists to ecologists, from pundit to pop culture, greed means different things. …”. In other entries “excessive” appeared regularly. Excessive would be merely a matter of opinion.

It seems a good bet whatever CEO you had in mind does not opine that his gains are excessive. If his company is among the many grossing a billion per year, a CEO earning a million is receiving only 0.1 percent of that gross. Not much for having total responsibility for the huge tasks of production, accounting, marketing, R&D, thousands of workers and staff…. A company of such size needs the best CEO it can buy, but must bid against all other companies to get that best CEO, who must compete against other candidates for that position. Once again the law of supply and demand applies.

So these CEO’s must be the very best they can be. It’s not about greed, it’s about value. There’s nothing stopping you from striving for the same, so what’s the problem?

My http://morality101.net and it’s blogger might give you some good insight into all this. It’s all about the moral basis necessary to your rights and freedom; greed is nowhere in that scenario.