It’s unreasonable to expect one person to actually have the kind of accountability you seem to think CEOs are simply choosing not to exercise.
I would rather workers just got paid a reasonable wage.
Think also about the Boeing engineers who, no doubt, were pressured from higher ups to sign off on faulty designs.
If the higher ups knew that their personal freedom was on the line, they would not pressure workers to do illegal stuff.
Right now, companies come up with incentives that reward illegal behavior which allows the higher ups to profit, while leaving the low-level workers with the criminal liability.
[1] https://work.chron.com/average-income-ceo-fortune-500-compan...
If the CEO was subject to this sort of personal risk, I believe there would be far more systems/processes in place to make sure that there wasn't any sort of illegal activity going on (random external audits/investigations, more protections--or even rewards--for whistleblowers, etc.)
Taking the VW emissions scandal as an example, there's an estimate that suggests that there will be 1200 premature deaths because of the increased pollution [1]. This has an obvious personal cost to the victims & their families, and there is a larger cost to the overall economy because of the decreased worker output. This doesn't even take into account the growing cost of pollution as a factor in global warming.
[1] http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...
Given that most people break the law in minor ways quite often, I'm relatively sure there second is false. And I really wouldn't bet on the first being true either...
Valve stole from an estimated 20,000 Australians before a judge recognized their former refund policy as being designed to refuse refunds rather than disburse them. Under a system of accountability about 20,000 Australians and maybe several hundred thousand others around the world wouldn't have been stolen from by Valve, who got away with this massive fraud by paying a small fine they contested and changing their refund policy. GOG still enjoys a similarly disingenuous refund policy where you must help them prove the game can open on your computer which is the threshold they invented for denying refunds.
https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/valve-australia-fine-12...
Google realized at some point that they had not coded up a particular kind of refund and let it sit for twenty years, stealing $75 million from their advertising customers persisting long after they knew. Under a system of accountability these companies wouldn't be being stolen from by Google, who got away with this massive fraud by refunding an amount they calculated.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-emails-adtrader-lawsu...
Facebook realized at some point they could steal from children and started both optimizing for more confusing virtual currency purchases and refusing refunds on accounts they identified as children using parents' funds. Under a system of accountability exploiting these children and defrauding their parents wouldn't require a multi-year lawsuit to resolve with a small check.
https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...
Then there's the mystery of who's still paying for AOL dialup. Across the internet zombie subscription fraud and free-trial fraud must be in the tens of billions a year, companies optimize around fraud so hard we have to call it dark patterns so they can disassociate from the criminality of what they are doing.
I think a better base line is targeting an individual. Healthcare, 400sq feet, electricity, water, gas, and UBI to cover food and leisure. From there job compensation can be tied to market rate and people looking for more can choose how they'll get it.
In the 50's and 60's, the US was basically the only developed country that hadn't had its homeland destroyed by the war. This meant that there was very little competition for US companies.
In addition, the labor markets were tight. Remember, half of the population (women) were not expected to be in the job market long term, but rather to get married and stay at home. There was outright discrimination against people of color. Thus you had very little outside competition for US companies, with tight labor markets in the US, this resulted in generally good pay and benefits for US workers.
The natural birth right is to compete for such needs and to maim / kill if necessary to obtain them. No safety or protections. Possibly small tribal units to operate beyond the individual.
A rational mind recognizes that the above leads to violence and associated negative outcomes. It also often poorly allocates resources and does not well adapt to the ability to engineer our environment for better outcomes.
Wages are also often conflated with a belief that there isn't a relationship between the average purchasing power over a population and the pricing of goods for said population. Supply and demand curves from econ101 exist to describe why that isn't true.
Thus another way of viewing wages, reasonable or not, is in terms of comparison among workers. The real question would be one of disparity between the have most and have least: how much more is one individual worth than another? Business expenses and such deducted beforehand, I couldn't even see Iron Man (Tony Stark) being "worth" more than about 100X what even the least worthy individual is; let alone a normal CEO. I find it extremely unlikely that normal worker wages have grown 100% since 1978 (or over any other timeframe) to at least keep parity with that measure...