Hehe, maybe! Or perhaps people would avoid working at places with such laws, as they tend to do currently with other economies that have strict laws that make it hard to do business.
>Or perhaps people would avoid working at places with such laws, as they tend to do currently with other economies that have strict laws that make it hard to do business.
I have no problem with that. Let them leave.
Suppose we set a maximum compensation cap of $10M/year in the US. So executives can no longer earn more than $10M/year in total compensation (salary, bonus, golden parachute, etc.).
So a bunch of overpaid execs leave the US. Where exactly are they going to go where they'll 1) be paid more than $10M/year, and 2) actually be able to do these super-high-paying executive jobs effectively (i.e., they need to know the local language, etc.)?
If the maximum wage affected few enough people, then the effect on where people live their lives would be small. Set it at the 99.9th percentile or 99.99th percentile income or something to that effect. (per-household, those seem to be $1.5M and $7m per year). One in ten thousand people leaving the country might have a tiny effect, especially since the top paid one in ten thousand doesn't have as much correlation as you'd hope with the top most group social good providing one in ten thousand.
Hard to implement in practice. If I give you N options with a strike price of $X and the company is worth $X/share today, I gave you zero dollars worth of compensation, sort of, so the government can't prevent that with a max wage law. If the price goes up by $1, you've just earned $N. Cap the wage, and typical N will likely go up.
