The limitarians are coming

Limitarianism is a thing. I read about it just this past week.

Limitarians are people who espouse a "maximum wage." We're open to the idea of a minimum wage; why not have a maximum wage to cap the other end of the spectrum?

Why not indeed?

Doctors are arguably the most respected profession, and we should compensate them accordingly.  Doctors have to be really smart and work very hard to be doctors. When the local health authority was advertising for doctors in the past year, they were offering salaries in the range of 250 to 350 thousand dollars a year. That's roughly twenty to thirty thousand a month.

That seems close enough to reasonable that I won't quibble with it. But why does anyone need to make more than that?

That's the limitarian line, and they propose to tax the hell out of any income above that or some other arbitrary threshold.

I'm OK with that.

There'll be plenty of hysterical counter-arguments, to be sure.

"What about professional athletes? Their careers most often only last a few years."

Huh? We've been telling the kids for years now that they should expect to have five or more different "careers" in their career... but athletes are exempt?

I think not!

There'll also be a lot of caterwauling about how this stymies entrepreneurial types. You know, those small business owners who are allegedly the backbone of the economy.

At least 95% of small business owners only dream of making thirty thousand a month, so an upper limit in that range is more or less meaningless to them.

If we had a $15/ hour minimum wage and a thirty thousand a month max, we'd have a factor of twelve between the top rung and the bottom. That's enough of a differentiation that folks would still be motivated to get a good education, work hard, etc., but not enough to allow the proliferation of an uber-rich class with so much spare cash they can afford to buy our political system.


And that would be a good thing.