Maximum wage

Vompatti wrote: Blacksword wrote: Vompatti wrote: condor wrote: HackettFan wrote: It seems much more constructive to me to make sure the top earners are properly taxed. Yes, but isn't a maximum wage easier to achieve? The easiest would be to make the wage the same for everyone. Make everyone equally poor? Doesn't sound like a very good system. Try telling that to the majority of millennials who would prefer such a system.

The grass is always greener. Our current system is badly broken. That's true enough.

But, with the greatest of respect, millenials know nothing about communism or living under it. Ask most people who lived in the former Soviet Union, would they like t go back there and the answer would be a resounding NO! put it this way, very few people used to defect TO the USSR, back in the day. I grew up with Czech refugees, I know what they went through...

Of course, communisim, like capitalism - with its promises of trickle down economics - works brilliantly on paper, and this is what millienials, and all advocates of communism probably go on, but as history has shown, theory and practice differ enormously in politics. For example, the across the board equality millenials strive so hard to achieve on college campasses and beyond, has no place under communism.

Edited by Blacksword - November 15 2017 at 05:32

Vompatti wrote: condor wrote: HackettFan wrote: It seems much more constructive to me to make sure the top earners are properly taxed. Yes, but isn't a maximum wage easier to achieve? The easiest would be to make the wage the same for everyone.

Make everyone equally poor? Doesn't sound like a very good system.

Vompatti wrote: condor wrote: HackettFan wrote: It seems much more constructive to me to make sure the top earners are properly taxed. Yes, but isn't a maximum wage easier to achieve? The easiest would be to make the wage the same for everyone.

condor wrote: Big Swifty wrote: Let the market decide. Why?

Big Swifty wrote: Let the market decide.

Actually, I am of the opposite opinion....

By "socialist" countries, is this an Americanism or are we actually talking about "socialist" countries ? ;-)

In the USSR, which was arguably "socialist" until the New Economic Policy of 1921, everyone was supposedly paid an equal amount. However. This absolutely never happened in practice, with people being designated as "responsible workers" and getting a higher pay packet, better living conditions, more perks.  To own a dacha - a country house - you absolutely had to be a member of the Party, and most people seemed to join for financial or career progression, rather than out of political conviction. 

If we're talking "socialist" as an Americanism for places like Scandinavia, my experience of working abroad is that there isn't really a maximum wage, but you quickly fall into higher tax brackets than here in the UK, which effectively caps what you earn quite quickly. I preferred living in Holland and Germany, it was a socially fairer system. 

I do think it's time for a maximum wage, though. Although most of the rich are sneaky enough to get around it. £200k opens you an anonymous Swiss bank account, I seem to recall - or was it £300k ? Tax free, you just sign a disclaimer that it's not the result of illegal or terrorist activity. 

condor wrote: HackettFan wrote: It seems much more constructive to me to make sure the top earners are properly taxed. Yes, but isn't a maximum wage easier to achieve?

It seems much more constructive to me to make sure the top earners are properly taxed.

What are you views on this? Does anyone know about the maximum wage under socialist regimes?