If the Miss USA Pageant scored on economic acumen, then surely Miss Texas would have fared better than First Runner Up.

On Sunday, Ylianna Guerra, a Houston resident and a recent college graduate, nailed the question asked by judge and former Miss Universe Michelle McClean-Bailey: “Last year, CEOs in the United States made around 300-times as much as the average worker’s salary. Should the government impose boundaries on salaries of executives?”

The question begged for a feel-good, vague appeal to “fairness” — something much closer to what presidential candidate and multi-millionaire Hillary Clinton offers in response to “income inequality.” But Miss Guerra didn’t play it that way.

“That’s a good question,” she responded. “You know, I think that if you work hard enough you can attain anything — this is the land of opportunity. CEOs, I believe that they work hard enough for their money, so they should be able to attain whatever it is they are working for.”

In other words, let the markets decide.

In fact, the issue of CEO pay is really nothing more than the politics of envy. CEOs aren’t the only highly compensated Americans, but no one on the left complains that athletes or Hollywood’s limousine socialists like Joss Whedon are overpaid.

Forbes magazine addressed this issue in 2013, following a New York Times editorial ranting about “lavish” pay for executives.

“It appears that there are 43 Major League baseball players who will earn $15 million or more in 2013, not counting endorsements, just their baseball contracts,” the magazine noted. “So the 43rd highest paid baseball player is about equal to the 100th highest paid corporate CEO. If we added in football, basketball and hockey, I suspect that the top 100 athletes are beating out the CEOs. Comparing salaries between CEOs and athletes does not tell us if one or the other is being paid too much or too little. But it does make clear that big numbers alone do not mean people are being overpaid.”

It’s fairly easy to calculate what a ballplayer adds to a team — in terms of performance and wins, sure, but also in terms of ticket sales. It’s harder to calculate exact value for a CEO. There’s profitability, but how do you figure in good decisions, or even more importantly, the bad decisions that were avoided?

“CEO pay may or may not be too high, but until somebody compares their pay to the marginal profit they have brought to their companies, we won’t know,” Forbes notes.

But the argument really being made by the Times (and in that Miss USA question) is that CEOs are paid too much at the expense of the employees. That’s false.

“Companies that pay their CEOs less will not turn around and give the other employees raises,” Forbes points out. “When corporate boards overpay a CEO, it is shareholders who lose because profits that could have become either shareholder dividends or capital gains are instead going into the pocket of the CEO.”

Miss Texas understands this. If only more politicians did.