I agree that minimum wage laws are a step in the direction I want to go. The other end could be capped by a highly progressive tax system. If tax rates climbed to 90 per cent for high income earners, much of the inequality I’m worried about would be eliminated.

What we’re talking about here is means. The question is how high should the minimum wage be? How high should the tax rates go? If the minimum wage rate is high and the tax on high income earners is raised substantially, the types of problems I discussed in the past several posts rear their ugly heads.

All in all, the discussion on equal pay was interesting, but I found I wasn’t very inspired from it. I think the reason is that I’m not motivated to pay everyone equally so surmounting obstacles to doing so doesn’t excite me.

You started out by saying that you wanted equal pay because you support an egalitarian approach, then you addressed challenges or reasons that it might not work.

I’m trying to think of how you could do this backwards. What if you started off with no controls over salary at all, then addressed the problems that would come? One measure that we currently have is a minimum wage. Are there other measures that would make a less-controlled system more palatable to you?

This could be tricky because it depends on your objective – if the end-goal is egalitarian salaries, there is no way to mitigate an uncontrolled system.

Eric