The mania for boards of big enterprises to give top executives ever more gargantuan compensation (regardless of how well their companies do) goes on apace, including at what are technically supposed to be “nonprofit” organizations. In the past 30 years, average compensation for CEOs at big companies has gone from about 40 times that of the lowest-paid worker to about 400 times. Somehow we don’t see the U.S. economy or society as having improved commensurately.

Consider CEO George Vecchione’s startling $2.96 million-a-year compensation to run Lifespan, the “nonprofit” Providence-based hospital chain, as detailed in The Providence Phoenix the other week, based on public records.

The soft-spoken former accountant is New England’s highest paid hospital executive. He made considerably more than the runner-up in New England, reports The Phoenix — James Mongan, CEO of Boston-based Partners HealthCare, which is much bigger and more “prestigious” than Lifespan. Mr. Mongan’s pay and benefits package to run “nonprofit” Partners totaled a mere $2.02 million. Still, not bad, when the average family income is about $50,000 a year in America.

Meanwhile, the pay and benefits of another Rhode Island “nonprofit”-hospital-chain chief, John Hynes, was $1.4 million last year to run Care New England, reports The Phoenix from the public records. And the other senior execs at these chains have been making fortunes, too.

How many nurses or doctors don’t get hired; how many people don’t get treated; how many double shifts must be worked, etc., to pay for these Wall Street-style compensations?

Of course, the boards of such “nonprofit” companies trot out the argument that you have to pay such vast sums (even by what are supposed to be charitable organizations — thus subsidized by the taxpayers). We hear that people must be of near-genius proportions to run these outfits and that they’ll only work for vast sums. (No altruism anymore, apparently.) That’s funny — people seemed to do okay running big organizations at reasonable pay before the mania for hyper-pay started about 1980.

We used to hear the stuff about the world-historical genius of Wall Street and Detroit executives, who then drove their companies and the U.S. economy into the ground, assisted by friendly government officials, of course. Oh yes, these individuals were absolutely essential. No one else could do their jobs, etc., etc. But as Charles DeGaulle said: “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”

The boards, which mostly consist of allies of the CEOs, conveniently forget that many people getting paid much, much less, such as the president of the United States, government agency heads, governors, mayors, admirals, generals and the heads of some large nonprofits, run far larger and more complex organizations than the likes of Mr. Vecchione or other hyper-paid executives — and seem to do just fine.

The problem began when board members, many of them wealthy, pumped up the pay of CEOs on the endlessly repeated idea that such people were indispensable because they were stars, and stars because they were indispensable — in a kind of circular reasoning. The rise of heavily self-promoting executive celebrities such as Citibank’s Walter Wriston, Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca and GM’s Jack Welch helped fuel an obsession with hiring senior managers at exorbitant wages.

Then there’s the argument that the execs are always on call, 24/7, so they should be paid hundreds of times what the little people are paid. But lots of people are on call 24/7, such as doctors, politicians and many, many others. And they don’t all have underlings to help them.

Also, since other board members are usually rich, they are made uncomfortable by the CEO not being rich, too. Bad for club morale! Even at big nonprofits! The boards, many of whose members are directly chosen by the CEO, operate in a mutually beneficial relationship with their CEOs, often including financially. Lifespan’s board, by the way, basically selects itself.

Somehow, we think large nonprofits can find lots of good CEOs for places like Lifespan who would work for considerably less than what Mr. Vecchione has been working for.

The issue of executive pay at “nonprofits” deserves a good airing. This is, after all, mostly the public’s money. A little more public service, please, and a little less avarice.