Moreover, price ceilings have a rich and long empirical and theoretical argument against their existence in the economics literature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling
Finally, by what measure do you feel able to assert that no one is more productive than someone else based on some constant? How much more productive was the team of the Manhattan project than some other team of physicists?
If someone is making a claim that someone is clearly doing something wrong, the burden of proof should -- to some extent -- be on them to explain why despite this, they are continuing to be successful without going out of business (if that is in fact the case).
For example, it feels to me that the way FANG companies hire SDEs and place them on teams is inefficient and weird. Why are 24 year old 1337coders considered fungible to work on any project? It doesn't make sense to me. But it's hard for me to convince myself that my feeling is correct, given that there are billions of dollars on the table for anyone who can come up with a better strategy.
...Of course, we can actually be even more clever than this, if we want, and imagine models where we are both right (of course they might not be true).
For example, we might say the value provided by a manager is, on average, $1,000,000. However, this is driven mostly by the top 10 percentile who are worth $10,000,00 a year, whereas the median is actually slightly overpaid. We can justify this distribution by adding uncertainty on the signal. A more thoughtful model of this quick example exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar...
So the next question would be: What is more likely? That people are overpaid, obviously, and the government needs to stop it? Or the market is behaving optimally under complex uncertainty, and the government, being no better at interpreting signal than these firms themselves, is likely just to make things more complicated and screwed up by entering? (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, but if you want to solve it formally follow the journal articles in the link I shared above).
Sure, but first lend me a few hundred million in capital would ya?
I realize not every business requires that much but I work for an oil supermajor... so, little hard to do what you're suggesting without your help. The "capital" in "capitalism" keeps getting in the way.
Fast forward to the 1860s, and nail production is automated to the extent that wire nails can be produced by the tens of millions with almost no human intervention.
The worker who forges nails by hand and the inventor who automates their production are undoubtedly orders of magnitude apart in productivity.
Having met people causing net negative productivity, this is pretty hard to believe. Why do you expect this to be true?
Do we have 1000x or more business leaders? Because that's how well compensated a select few of them are. I don't believe we have. Because at most one developer is 100 times more productive than other one, so it makes no sense that a business person would be 1000 times more productive than another one.
> Concept and origin (1991)
> Partial closure (2018)
To essentially cap wages, you could use higher tax rates in higher tax brackets, and that might actually be enforceable as it would leverage the existing enforcement apparatus that has decades of experience patching workarounds.