Would slapstick producers want to limit pratfalls? Unlikely. Priests to stem confessions? Not in this world. Politicians setting quotas for bluster? Now you're just being silly.

So why expect caps on executive pay?

Yet some folks are trying them again this proxy season. According to a February report from the Investor Responsibility Research Center and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, executive pay has been the "overwhelming focus" of shareholder concerns among more than 2,000 companies tracked by the groups. Of 625 corporate governance resolutions sponsored by shareholders, 44 percent were tied to executive compensation.

Pay critics will get the occasional minor victory. Last year, for example, Bank of America and Norfolk agreed that golden parachutes for their executives should be approved by shareholders. But there still aren't no real restrictions on how much executives can negotiate.

Two statistics from 2002 make it easy to understand investors' irritation: CEOs' median compensation rose 14 percent; the S&P 500 fell 22 percent. The combination makes for easy outrage. The headline of a recent FORTUNE article thunders with indignation: "Have they no shame?"

No, they don't. They never will as long as individuals let financial professionals handle their investments.

There's this idea that corporate honchos are separate from Wall Street and its institutions. That one of the jobs of "The Street" is to act as a sort of foil and control over companies built on the public's dollar through stock offerings or bond issues.

But from the viewpoint of investors -- especially groups such as hedge funds and mutual funds -- once you take their money, you're part of their world. After all, they have the same goal: serving their shareholders. And the more assets being managed, the more likely an investment pro will view CEOs as peers.

Few people would agree to limit their own pay, and the concept is particularly heretical to an industry where fees are based not on absolute figures, but percentages of assets. Almost no one would go into professional money management if there were pay ceilings at the top.

And you expect institutional managers -- who control almost half of all shares in the stock market -- to vote for controls on CEO salaries? Financial pros don't want to limit CEO pay -- they want to make it themselves. Even the breakdowns are similar -- like CEOs, fund managers typically get much of their take-home pay through bonuses rather than base salaries.

Not that fund managers' take-home pay follows an always-rising curve. The Association for Investment Management and Research and Russell Reynolds Associates conducts a survey of money managers' pay every two years, and the next one, scheduled for release on May 15, will show a drop in fund managers' compensation, said Rich Wyler, an AIMR spokesman. "The trend is definitely downward because of reduced bonuses," Wyler said.

It's not empathy in action, but simply the inevitable result after three years of a lousy stock market. A better measure of how money managers view their long-term value can be found when people are putting money into funds, rather than leaving them.

The last AIMR/Russell survey from 2001 -- early in the bear market and a time when people were still putting money into funds -- indicated that median expected pay for fund managers was $436,500, a 35 percent increase from $322,500 in 1999. The average fund in the United States rose about 9 percent over the same period, the Wall Street Journal noted. The top 10 percent of fund managers with at least five years of experience anticipated pay of $1.8 million in 2001, or more than almost a third of the salaries listed in BusinessWeek's executive compensation scoreboard for the same year.

These folks are supposed to hold down corporate pay? Other than anonymous surveys, fund managers won't even reveal what they make themselves. Although publicly-traded companies must disclose compensation for their top executives, mutual funds face no such requirement. In fact, they'll be glad to tell that you don't really want to know what your mutual fund fees pay for. "For most of us investors, it’s fair to say we don’t care for the detail, and we trust the funds," an industry group spokesman told Consumer Reports recently.

And these are the organizations that control 45 percent of all shares traded on U.S. markets. The inmates aren't just running the asylum -- they own almost half of it, and until that changes, they'll get almost anything they want.

-- Sergio G. Non is the online editor of Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE.