Politics & Society3w ago · 88 comments
Should there be a maximum wage, the same way there's a minimum wage?
A hard ceiling on how much one person can be paid. Fairness and sanity, or a cap on ambition that punishes success? Pick a side.
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Add your comment- Feli2w ago
I'm a nurse. I work nights, weekends, holidays. I've held people's hands while they died. I make $68k. A hedge fund manager who moves money around a spreadsheet makes $68 million. If you can look at those two facts and think the market has allocated rewards correctly, I don't know what to tell you. I genuinely don't.
- Reese2w ago
Thank you for your work. Sincerely. But I'd push back slightly — nurses are underpaid because of political choices about healthcare funding, not because hedge fund managers are overpaid. Fixing one doesn't require capping the other. They're separate failures.
- Casey2w ago
They're not entirely separate though. Capital in politics means political priority. The financial industry has vastly more lobbying power than healthcare workers. The concentration of wealth literally shapes which problems get solved. You can't cleanly separate those things.
- Avery1w ago
my dad worked at the same factory for 31 years. same company that eventually gave the ceo a 47 million dollar bonus the year they announced layoffs. my dad got a watch. i don't want to hear about incentivizing excellence.
- Priya1w ago
I'm sorry that happened to your father. Genuinely. But you're making an emotional argument about a specific bad actor to justify a systemic policy. One company's misconduct doesn't prove a maximum wage would produce better outcomes economy-wide.
- Nina1w ago
One company? Mate, that story has been repeated in every industry in every country for forty years. At what point does a pattern stop being anecdote?
- Priya3d ago
I used to be firmly against a maximum wage. Then I spent three years working in pediatric oncology. I watched families lose everything paying for their kids' cancer treatment while the hospital's executives got stock options. Something shifted. I don't have a clean policy answer but I know the current system is not morally defensible.
- Feli _x6d ago
I work in HR. Executive compensation packages are decided by boards whose members are themselves executives at other companies. They vote each other raises. It's a cartel, not a market. The 'market rate' for a CEO is whatever CEOs on each other's boards agree it is.
- Casey6d ago
This is the most important structural point in this whole thread and it has fewer likes than the Christmas uncle story. The interlocking board problem is real and documented and largely ignored in popular debate.
- Hana2w ago
Punishes success? My guy. Jeff Bezos could stop earning entirely today and his grandchildren's grandchildren would never work a day. What ambition are we protecting exactly. The ambition to have a ninth yacht?
- Alex S.2w ago
This but also we should be honest that most people pushing back on max wage aren't CEOs. They're regular people who've absorbed the idea that billionaires deserve their money because they themselves MIGHT get rich someday. It's hope functioning as a political ideology.
- Reese B.2w ago
That's a pretty condescending way to describe people who simply disagree with you. Maybe some of us object on principle, not because we're sleep-walking through some false consciousness you diagnosed for us.
- Quinn _x2w ago
What principle exactly? "Some people deserve to own more than small nations for reasons I can't quite articulate but feel strongly about" — is that the principle?
- Elena2w ago
Property rights. Individual liberty. The idea that voluntary transactions between adults don't require government approval. Those are principles. You may disagree with them but pretending they don't exist or are just disguised greed is lazy.
- Leo 211w ago
Tried to explain the concept of a maximum wage to my uncle at Christmas. He said it was communism. Then he complained his rent had gone up 40% and his son couldn't afford to buy a house. These are not unrelated facts, my guy.
- Zara1w ago
Actually some do leave. Eduardo Saverin renounced US citizenship before Facebook IPO to avoid taxes. It does happen. Not saying that means we shouldn't try, just that it's a real consideration not a strawman.
- Feli L.1w ago
I've started just asking people who oppose a maximum wage: what number would be too much? Just pick a number. 10 million a year? 100 million? A billion? They almost always refuse to answer, which tells you everything about how seriously they've thought about it.
- Kofi6d ago
Fine, I'll answer. No number. I don't think the state gets to decide the ceiling on voluntary transactions between consenting adults. That's my principled position. You can disagree with it but at least it's consistent.
- Maya6d ago
also the 'voluntary transaction' argument disappears immediately when those same people support occupational licensing, non-compete clauses, and IP law. freedom of contract is selectively applied depending on who benefits
- Omar6d ago
A transaction between a corporation and an executive is not 'two consenting adults.' One party has almost unlimited leverage, connections, and legal firepower. The other often doesn't. The 'voluntary transaction' framing smuggles in a lot of false assumptions about equal power.
- Reese 923w ago
The idea that someone "earns" 400 million dollars in a year is philosophically incoherent. No human being produces that much value personally. What they're capturing is the collective labor of thousands of people, the infrastructure built by taxpayers, and frankly just luck of timing. A maximum wage isn't punishing success — it's acknowledging that past a certain point you're not succeeding, you're extracting.
- Drew 211w ago
The ratio model makes way more sense than a hard cap. Cap CEO pay at, say, 50x the lowest-paid worker in the same company. Now the only way to pay yourself more is to pay everyone more. Suddenly the incentive structure changes completely. Why is nobody seriously proposing this?
- Reese S.1w ago
because then they just outsource the lowest paid workers to a contractor and the ratio problem disappears on paper. these people have entire law firms dedicated to finding these gaps before the ink is dry
- Iris B.3d ago
The brain drain argument is so tired. Where exactly are all these CEOs going to flee? Some magical country with zero taxes and unlimited pay where they can still access American consumers, American infrastructure, American rule of law? Name it. I'll wait.
- Noah K.1w ago
the funniest thing about this debate is that the people most loudly defending the right to make unlimited money are people making $45k arguing on behalf of someone who will never know they exist
- Hana3w ago
I worked in HR for a Fortune 500 company for eleven years. The pay gap between frontline staff and executives wasn't about productivity, skill, or value created. It was about who was in the room when decisions got made. Full stop. The market mythology around executive compensation is something insiders laugh about privately.
- Diego3w ago
reply to the person above me: if that's true why did you stay for 11 years? genuine question
- Priya3w ago
Because I had a mortgage and two kids in school, which is exactly the trap the system is designed to create, thanks for asking.
- Avery S.3d ago
at this point i've read every comment in this thread and the most honest thing i can say is: we already decided as a society that some outcomes are too bad to allow (minimum wage, child labor laws, workplace safety). we just haven't decided that some outcomes at the top are too obscene to allow. thats not economics. thats politics. and politics can change.
- Morgan T.1w ago
There's something deeply strange about calling a maximum wage a "cap on ambition" when the ambition in question is to accumulate more money than any individual could spend in a thousand lifetimes. At some point accumulation isn't ambition, it's just... a number going up on a screen while real people go without.
- Quinn1w ago
The whole premise assumes wages are the mechanism of wealth accumulation at the top. They're not. Jeff Bezos' 'salary' for years was like $81,500. The action is in equity, dividends, carried interest, capital gains. A maximum WAGE is basically cosmetic unless you address capital.
- Drew _x1w ago
This. A hundred times this. We're debating curtains while the house is on fire. Wage reform without capital reform is theater.
- Casey1w ago
Okay but 'it doesn't fix everything' is not the same as 'it fixes nothing.' Incremental change is still change. The perfect solution being unavailable doesn't make every partial solution worthless.
- Diego5d ago
I just think it's wild that we regulate how long someone can work, what conditions they work in, what age they can start working — all constraints on labor — but the moment you suggest regulating the upward limit everyone suddenly discovers a deep principled commitment to the unregulated free market. We've already decided labor is not purely a market good. Why pretend otherwise?
- Iris5d ago
ngl this point hit different. never thought about it that way. we regulate every other dimension of work but mysteriously only the ceiling is untouchable
- Diego L.2w ago
ngl the ratio idea makes more sense to me than a hard cap. like, a CEO can make whatever, but only X times what the lowest paid person in their org makes. that way the incentive to pay workers better is baked in. company wants to pay the boss more? raise the floor first.
- Alex2w ago
The ratio model sounds elegant until you realize the first thing companies do is outsource the low-wage jobs to contractors, so technically they're not "employees" and the ratio doesn't count them. They did exactly this after some cities tried living wage ordinances. These people are professionals at finding exits.
- Maya2w ago
So we close the contractor loophole. Laws get amended. That's how legislation works? The argument "they'll find a workaround" applies to every law ever written and proves nothing.
- Omar B.2d ago
Rather than a hard maximum wage, what if the law said: your highest-paid employee cannot earn more than X times your lowest-paid? Ratio-based. Suddenly the CEO's raise requires raising the floor too. That aligns incentives instead of just cutting off the top. Not a perfect policy but it's targeting the *relationship* between top and bottom, which is where the actual injustice lives.
- Feli R.2d ago
This is honestly the best structural idea in this entire thread and it still won't happen because the people who write the laws are the people whose compensation it would cap. That's the whole game.
- Jamie2w ago
I actually think the better question is whether we even need a maximum wage specifically, or just genuinely progressive taxation that makes earning above a certain threshold functionally pointless anyway. You want to make $50M? Go for it. You just net $2M of it. Same practical outcome, fewer philosophical problems.
- Jordan2w ago
this is the correct answer. the wage cap debate is kind of a distraction. fix the tax code. marginal rates in the 1950s and 60s were above 90% at the top and somehow innovation still happened and the economy grew faster than it does now. weird.
- Ravi2w ago
The 1950s comparison again. Okay, there were also barely any countries to compete with economically because Europe and Asia had just been bombed flat. It's not the tax rate that caused the growth, it's the lack of global competition. Context matters.
- Reese2w ago
Sure but nobody was fleeing those 90% marginal rates to go live in Japan or West Germany either, were they. The "talent will leave" argument assumes mobility that mostly didn't and doesn't exist for most people.
- Elena M.3d ago
Here's the thing people miss: extreme wealth at the top doesn't just stay there. It buys political influence, media ownership, think tanks that shape the Overton window, academic chairs. The problem isn't just inequality of lifestyle. It's inequality of power over everyone else's lives. A maximum wage is partly about economics and partly about containing undemocratic power concentration.
- Casey _x3d ago
So what's your prescription then? Because 'the proposed solution is imperfect' followed by nothing is just status quo defense with extra steps.
- Feli1w ago
I keep seeing "they'll just leave" as if that settles it. Where exactly are they leaving to? Monaco? Fine. Singapore? Also fine. Most ultra-high earners are embedded in ecosystems — legal systems, infrastructure, talent pools, supply chains, consumer markets — that exist because of collective investment. You can't just airlift that.
- Riley1w ago
One guy renounced citizenship for tax purposes and that's the argument against restructuring compensation for millions of workers? I need the math on that to make sense before I find it compelling.
- Ravi4d ago
The framing of 'punishes success' has always bothered me. It assumes that current compensation levels reflect the degree of someone's contribution. But nurses, teachers, sanitation workers — people whose work is objectively essential to society — aren't compensated like it. The 'success' being rewarded is often negotiating power, not social value.
- Drew2d ago
I'm genuinely torn on this. My dad worked construction his whole life, arthritis in both hands by 55, made decent money but nothing spectacular. His project manager — who barely set foot on site — walked away with bonuses bigger than dad's annual salary. Is that market efficiency? Or is it just that some people are better positioned to extract value than to create it? I don't know how you legislate the difference but I feel it.
- Zara3w ago
We've decided there's a floor below which it's immoral to pay someone, but no ceiling above which one person hoarding is immoral. Why is only one direction sacred?
- Marco2d ago
I'm a small business owner. I've never paid myself more than twice what my lowest-paid employee makes, not because of a law but because it felt wrong to do otherwise. It's not radical. It's just basic dignity. The fact that this is considered some fringe economic position says everything about how warped our baseline has become.
- Reese2d ago
Respectfully, the 'I pay myself fairly and it feels right' anecdote is lovely but it's not policy. Good individuals existing doesn't mean you don't need rules. We have drunk driving laws even though some people would never drive drunk voluntarily. The whole POINT of regulation is that we don't leave it to personal virtue.
- Reese K.1w ago
Hot take: the reason we don't have a maximum wage is purely political, not philosophical or economic. The people who write the laws are themselves high earners or funded by high earners. This is not a complicated mystery. Follow the money, as someone once said.
- Avery1w ago
okay but this reasoning could justify almost any policy that hasn't been adopted. 'the reason we don't have X is because powerful people block it.' true of everything. doesn't actually tell us whether X is a good idea.
- Sam 211d ago
hot take: a maximum wage will never happen not because it's a bad idea but because the people who would vote on it would be voting to cap themselves. congress members leave office and walk into board seats and speaking fees. they're not going to saw off the branch they're sitting on. the real conversation isn't about whether a max wage is good policy. it's about how you build a political system where the people making decisions don't have a personal stake in the outcome. that's a much harder problem.
- Hana3w ago
When a CEO makes in a morning what their warehouse worker makes in a year, 'the market decided' stops being an explanation and starts being a confession.
- Jamie3w ago
hard pass. the second you tell me there's a legal limit on what i can make, i stop trying as hard. that's just human nature and no amount of theory changes it
- Drew3w ago
Cap the wage and the talent just leaves for somewhere that doesn't, taking the company and the jobs with it. Sounds fair, ends in unemployment.
- Yuki2w ago
My dad spent 30 years building a small manufacturing business. Worked 70-hour weeks. Wanted to leave it to us. Under some of these proposals he would have been heavily penalized for his success. So before you theorize about billionaires, remember "the rich" often means the person who built something real with their actual hands.
- Liam2w ago
A maximum wage on income wouldn't affect someone building a small family business in any significant way unless your dad was pulling down tens of millions annually, which... was he? Because if so, fair enough, but let's be honest about who we're talking about.
- Omar2w ago
The emotional anchor of "my dad worked hard" is doing a lot of work here that the argument itself can't do. I respect the sentiment genuinely. But policies should be evaluated on their structural effects, not on whether they'd have hypothetically inconvenienced a hard-working parent.
- Morgan5d ago
Switzerland actually held a referendum on a 1:12 pay ratio — highest to lowest — in 2013. 65% voted against it. So even a fairly equal society decided against a hard cap when given the direct choice. Worth noting.
- Zara5d ago
Worth noting that the Swiss referendum was also preceded by one of the most expensive corporate lobbying campaigns in Swiss history, and that Swiss inequality has measurably increased since. Democratic outcomes aren't automatically correct outcomes, especially when one side can spend unlimited money on the messaging.
- Liam1w ago
Counterpoint nobody wants to hear: some people genuinely are worth dramatically more to an organization than others. A researcher who develops a drug that saves a million lives — is their compensation really supposed to be capped the same way as someone who approved some spreadsheets? I'm not defending the status quo, I'm asking where the principle actually leads.
- Elena1w ago
The researcher who develops a life-saving drug usually makes a professor's salary while the patent gets owned by a corporation whose shareholders make the billions. So your hypothetical kind of proves the opposite point.
- Feli1w ago
Exactly. The people whose work generates the most value for society are almost never the ones capturing that value. The 'but what about genuine genius' argument assumes the current compensation system rewards genius. It largely doesn't.
- Casey S.3w ago
A max wage is easy to dodge — they'll just take it in stock and call it something else. The rich don't earn 'wages,' that's the whole trick.
- Ravi2w ago
Can someone explain the mechanism here? Like... what counts as "wages"? Bonuses? Deferred compensation? Equity grants? Royalties? The administrative nightmare alone would be a gift to lawyers and accountants that would dwarf whatever you managed to redistribute. This is less a policy and more a fantasy.
- Priya B.2w ago
Complexity of implementation is not the same as wrongness of principle. We say that about minimum wage too — "too hard to enforce, restaurants will just hide tips" — and yet somehow we manage. Difficulty ≠ impossibility.
- Diego3d ago
Some of you are describing legitimate problems — board capture, political capture, wage stagnation — but then proposing a solution (maximum wage) that doesn't actually target those problems. It's like diagnosing correctly and then prescribing the wrong medication. The diagnosis being right doesn't mean any treatment is valid.
- Morgan1d ago
Everyone in favor of this policy seems to assume that high executive pay comes at the direct expense of worker pay. That's not obviously true. Corporate compensation structures are complex. You could zero out every C-suite salary tomorrow and it might not meaningfully raise median worker wages. The math doesn't always work the way the moral intuition suggests it should.
- Priya1d ago
This argument drives me absolutely insane. 'It might not fix everything so let's not try it' — by this logic we should've never introduced the minimum wage because wages are complex. The point isn't that one policy solves all inequality. The point is that we as a society get to decide what outcomes we consider acceptable. Right now we've decided poverty wages are unacceptable but nine-figure compensation is totally fine. That's a CHOICE. We can make different ones.
- Reese1w ago
There's a libertarian argument I actually find worth engaging with: if you cap wages, you reduce the incentive to build the kinds of companies that employ thousands of people. The founder's potential upside is the bet they're making. Remove the ceiling, you might also remove some of the bets. I don't fully buy it but I think it deserves a real answer, not just mockery.
- Jordan1w ago
Real answer: the vast majority of small business founders and entrepreneurs are not motivated by 'maybe I'll make 400 million instead of 40.' The research on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation is pretty consistent that past a certain point more money does not produce more or better work. The 'remove the sky and people stop dreaming' argument is not evidence-based.
- Jamie 211w ago
I'm a small business owner. I employ 11 people. The maximum wage conversation always gets framed around billionaires and CEOs but the legislation would hit me too. Every time someone draws a line in the sand with 'fairness' they don't think about the middle cases. I work 70 hours a week. I built something. Where does my ceiling go?
- Yuki B.1w ago
Nobody is targeting you my friend. The numbers being discussed in serious policy circles are in the tens of millions annually. You're not in that bracket and you know it.
- Kofi1w ago
With respect — if you're making enough to bump against a maximum wage ceiling you're doing extremely well, and your 11 employees are probably still making considerably less. The 'what about small business owners' argument usually shows up as a shield for the top 0.001%. You're not who this policy is aimed at.
- Diego2d ago
okay but who decides what the cap IS. like is it 500k? 2 million? 10 million? because that conversation alone would take 40 years and 6 congressional collapses before we even got close to a vote
- Noah S.4d ago
Genuine question for people who support this: what happens to professional sports? A footballer can generate hundreds of millions in revenue for a club in a single season. Does Mbappe get capped? Does the rest of the value just go to club owners? I support the general principle but the implementation questions are not trivial.
- Kofi4d ago
Sports is actually a case where the union model has worked — players' associations have negotiated revenue shares directly. The NBA players get something like 50% of league revenue. That's a collective bargaining solution, not a state-imposed ceiling. Maybe the answer there is unions, not legislation.
- Hana R.2w ago
everyone in this thread acting like they know exactly where the cap would be set. "it won't affect small businesses!" how do you know? who sets the number? $500k? $2M? $10M? details matter and people always handwave them away
- Jamie2w ago
Counterpoint: we argue about where to set the minimum wage constantly and that debate hasn't stopped us from having one. Uncertainty about the exact number is not an argument against the concept.
- Casey1w ago
nobody ever got ambitious because there was no ceiling. they got ambitious because there was no floor. hunger motivates. comfort demotivates. a max wage is just manufactured comfort with a government stamp on it
- Leo1w ago
also the people who ARE primarily motivated by money at obscene levels... are those the people we actually want running critical institutions? because their track record in terms of fraud, externalized costs, and societal damage is not great
- Elena1w ago
Or maybe some of us have actually thought through the implications and arrived at a principled position that doesn't require us to personally benefit from it? By your logic, poor people shouldn't be able to argue for capitalism and rich people shouldn't argue for redistribution. You're just dismissing positions based on who holds them.
- Riley1w ago
This is empirically false. The most creative, driven people I've met in my life — scientists, teachers, doctors, artists — were not primarily motivated by uncapped earning potential. Intrinsic motivation is a real and well-documented thing. The assumption that humans only try hard for money says more about a particular cultural moment than about human nature.
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