Wall Street

Charles Morris is a naive man--very naive, indeed--to complain in his article (Opinion, June 15) that Wall Street’s Young Turks do much too little to be earning so much money.

It’s probably true that some of the very bright and talented young men in their late 20s and early 30s do earn as much as a million dollars a year for arranging the takeovers and mergers of big corporations, involving billions of dollars. But why should that be so shocking to Morris?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar earns far more than a million dollars a year, and all he does is put a ball through a round hoop. George Brett can hit a baseball better than most players, so his salary is in the millions, too. Rock stars earn tens of millions in a single year, and the only product they produce is a mindless assortment of deafening, tasteless music.

Morris should know better than to ask the financial community to “justify its enormous rewards.” No business or industry in a free enterprise system, functioning within the law, need justify its rewards. The corporate clients of the financial community provide all the justification necessary--by continuing to rely on the expertise of those competent young men of Wall Street who are apparently doing their job well.

MARVIN CANTZ

Tarzana