No kidding, people seem to pretend supply and demand don't exist and they can just ignore market forces. This sort of populist first order thinking sounds good if you don't think about it very hard, but never actually works. They'll either waste money overpaying people (and go out of business or simply operate a charity if they have deep pockets) or underpaying and fail to attract competitive talent. Presumably it's all just for show anyway, whatever happens will be even less fair than if they just paid market wages for the work they wanted done

exceptional talent from wealthy countries*

For entry-level American SWE pay, you could get the valedictorian from fairly high quality schools across the developing world and work them like dogs and they wouldn't complain.

I think this makes sense given the following:

1) you think you can handle the distributed/async workforce

2) you are OK with having mediocre US talent (made up for by exceptional foreign talent)

3) you think they can make up for not being exposed to modern SWEngineering culture by just being better in {IQ, Work Ethic, etc.}

So you're saying there's no exceptional talent in countries that generally have lower pay?