On a "Maximum Wage"
The Swiss are voting on a referendum to limit executive pay to 12x the pay of the lowest paid employee of the company. It's a popular socialist position recently, to attempt to keep compensation levels from getting too imbalanced, and encourage corporations to raise minimum wages. In the US, for example, CEO's can make well more than 100x the amount of the lowest paid workers in the same company, and that creates large wealth disparities. Somewhat surprisingly, I find myself in cautious agreement with the concept. I've been thinking about a similar thing recently, and here's what I would propose for the US. First, we'd need to establish some definitions of compensation. To that end, let's say that compensation includes all salary, benefits, bonuses, and other indirect compensation mechanisms (eg: stock options) given to an employee. Furthermore, let's say that for part-time employees, annual compensation is calculated to be their effective compensation ...