You get what you paid for applies to everything including salaries.
Hmmm. Lehman's CEO was not exactly underpaid. Nor Freddie Mac. Nor Fannie Mae. Nor GM. Nor Enron. Nor Worldcom. Nor Rich McGinn in his Lucent days.
And that's just the first people that spring to mind in 60 seconds.
Another way of looking: those places all got exactly what they paid for: someone good at manipulating a given set of rules and following strategies to the T, and who brings a fancy name to the table. Too bad they didn't also focus on the "changes behavior when the rules and the strategy don't make sense" too.
However each and every thing has its own price vs quality graph. If I am buying apples, a ten dollar apple is not likely to be ten times better than a one dollar apple.