A Maximum Wage?

[tbaldwin]

What utter nonsense, with no logic behind it whatsoever. Do you actually believe that drivel, or are you just bored at work?

What kind of 'socialist' is as anti-public sector as you?

The logic belboid is that if your a socialist you want to see more equality not less.
Supporting a maximum wage makes me anti public sector in your view? Twisted logic or what...Do you support a minimum wage in the public sector or is that anti public sector in your book as well?

 

[_angel_]

Don't doctors and surgeons get rather a lot more than £50k already?

I can understand someone who has had to train specifically for years and years to become a surgeon deserving more than £50k but not wanting to pay management more than that.

 

[belboid]

The logic belboid is that if your a socialist you want to see more equality not less.
Supporting a maximum wage makes me anti public sector in your view? Twisted logic or what...Do you support a minimum wage in the public sector or is that anti public sector in your book as well?

bit rich for you to talk about 'twisted logic' - not that you show any signs of understanding what logic is.

Your public sector only proposals would lead directly to more privatisation - something you fail miserably to argue wouldn't happen (except through a notion so poor any child could see through it), and so you are either anti-public sector, or a bit of a dunce - or possibly both, of course.

You will be voting in favour of more privatisation as well, of course.

 

[tbaldwin]

bit rich for you to talk about 'twisted logic' - not that you show any signs of understanding what logic is.

Your public sector only proposals would lead directly to more privatisation - something you fail miserably to argue wouldn't happen (except through a notion so poor any child could see through it), and so you are either anti-public sector, or a bit of a dunce - or possibly both, of course.

You will be voting in favour of more privatisation as well, of course.

What kind of nonsense is that. You say that we have to keep paying huge wages to bosses to avoid privatisation.....
How you come to that dubiuos conclusion i really cant guess.

And i am not anti public sector or in favour of more privatisation. And would like to see the public utilities bought back under public control as i think you probably already know...So it was a poor attempt at a slur.....
From somebody who thinks Socialism means supporting massive wages for bosses.....

 

[tbaldwin]

Don't doctors and surgeons get rather a lot more than £50k already?

I can understand someone who has had to train specifically for years and years to become a surgeon deserving more than £50k but not wanting to pay management more than that.

I think you probably could make a special case for some doctors and surgeons. But not administators etc,who far too much money goes too.
I do think the amount GPs get paid at the moment though is far too much and we should argue for cap on their wages.

 

[belboid]

oh dear, having to totally distort what I say in order to mount a 'defence', how piss poor, even by your standards.

You will find no defence of huge wages from me, just a simple pointing out of the massive holes in your argument. An argument you haven't even attempted to rebut.

 

[tbaldwin]

oh dear, having to totally distort what I say in order to mount a 'defence', how piss poor, even by your standards.

You will find no defence of huge wages from me, just a simple pointing out of the massive holes in your argument. An argument you haven't even attempted to rebut.

What arguement have you made to show that paying bosses high wages avoids privatisation? er NONE.ZERO.ZILCH.........

 

[belboid]

fibber

 

[Giles]

What about the bloke who works for himself? Anything from a builder, plasterer, IT bod, whatever?

Would he only be allowed to earn £50K a year, or what?

If he could sell his skills such that he could earn his allotted maximum wage in two months, how would you stop him from earning more?

If you exempt self-employed people, then the next step would be tiny companies - consisting of two or three people. Would they have problems because although all three employees / owners had earned the business £200K each, they wouldn't be allowed to pay themselves more than £50K each a year? Would they be allowed to employ their wives, kids etc to get around the limit?

If you exempt people like the above, what's to stop more people setting up their own companies, as I.T. contractors often do, and getting round the maximum wage by so doing.

It is not practical. Or fair.

Giles..

 

[_angel_]

I thought this thread was generally about workers in the public sector.

 

[tbaldwin]

What about the bloke who works for himself? Anything from a builder, plasterer, IT bod, whatever?

Would he only be allowed to earn £50K a year, or what?

If he could sell his skills such that he could earn his allotted maximum wage in two months, how would you stop him from earning more?

If you exempt self-employed people, then the next step would be tiny companies - consisting of two or three people. Would they have problems because although all three employees / owners had earned the business £200K each, they wouldn't be allowed to pay themselves more than £50K each a year? Would they be allowed to employ their wives, kids etc to get around the limit?

If you exempt people like the above, what's to stop more people setting up their own companies, as I.T. contractors often do, and getting round the maximum wage by so doing.

It is not practical. Or fair.

Giles..

Thats actually quite a good arguement in relation to people who work for themselves....But not in relation to the parasites who skim off so much of the money intended for worthwhile causes.
I think it makes sense if unlike you giles people want to see more equal wages to say how it could work. I think it would be easiest to agree a maximum wage for the public and voluntary sector and it could have an excellent knock on effect with contarctors etc....

 

[kabbes]

Hang on, hang on, hang on.

There's no way that you can talk about a general maximum wage without addressing the flip-side of that equation -- accumulated wealth. If you don't touch accumulated wealth but limit the ability of those without it to accumulate it then the consequence is to really, really, really emphasise class divides even more than currently is the case.

£50k is a lot to earn you say? What about when a 3 bedroom house costs £500k? Round our way, £500k will only start to buy you a pretty standard family semi-detatched. If you limit the earning ability of those with no current wealth then you are basically guaranteeing that these houses will only ever stay in the hands of the families that are fortunate enough to already own them.

Then you have independent income. If you inherit £500k (for example, your parent's house as mentioned above) then you can easily generate a £25k income from that alone. This gives you the opportunity to have earnings 1.5 times that of the maximum wage! Yet another way to emphasise the divide between those with wealth and those without.

The only way you can ever have a maximum wage is in conjunction with a massive widespread review of ALL types of income and existing wealth. For a start, I think you would need a 100% inheritance tax above very low levels (something I'm in favour of anyway, but that's another issue). Otherwise the class divides that would arise would make the current divides look like a utopia of meritocracy by comparison.

 

[kabbes]

... and I don't think you can have a maximum wage in the public sector but not the private sector. Not without simply losing anybody of any management or professional quality to the private sector. That really is totally unworkable.

 

[tbaldwin]

Hang on, hang on, hang on.

There's no way that you can talk about a general maximum wage without addressing the flip-side of that equation -- accumulated wealth. If you don't touch accumulated wealth but limit the ability of those without it to accumulate it then the consequence is to really, really, really emphasise class divides even more than currently is the case.

£50k is a lot to earn you say? What about when a 3 bedroom house costs £500k? Round our way, £500k will only start to buy you a pretty standard family semi-detatched. If you limit the earning ability of those with no current wealth then you are basically guaranteeing that these houses will only ever stay in the hands of the families that are fortunate enough to already own them.

Then you have independent income. If you inherit £500k (for example, your parent's house as mentioned above) then you can easily generate a £25k income from that alone. This gives you the opportunity to have earnings 1.5 times that of the maximum wage! Yet another way to emphasise the divide between those with wealth and those without.

The only way you can ever have a maximum wage is in conjunction with a massive widespread review of ALL types of income and existing wealth. For a start, I think you would need a 100% inheritance tax above very low levels (something I'm in favour of anyway, but that's another issue). Otherwise the class divides that would arise would make the current divides look like a utopia of meritocracy by comparison.

You make the mistake of assuming that somebody who wants to have a maximum wage has not also thought about inherited wealth....See seperate thread i started about 2 years ago.....
It was another thread that exposed the real politics of a lot of radical wafflers....
And if you did put a limit on higher incomes property prices would also come down, which would be a good thing for millions of people..

 

[kabbes]

That... makes no sense? It simply is not a reply to what you have quoted.

 

[Giles]

Except for the problem of people earnign their own money - would you order a plumber to stop work in February if he had already earned his yearly maximum?

Etc......

It's a rubbish idea. If I think its worth paying someone x amount of money, and it is my money I am paying them, no-one else should be able to tell me I can't pay him that money.

Giles..

 

[tbaldwin]

Except for the problem of people earnign their own money - would you order a plumber to stop work in February if he had already earned his yearly maximum?

Etc......

It's a rubbish idea. If I think its worth paying someone x amount of money, and it is my money I am paying them, no-one else should be able to tell me I can't pay him that money.

Giles..

I understand your arguements for the free market giles. I just dont agree with them. I think wages need to be regulated...And just as people argued against a minimum wage they will also argue against a maximum wage.

But if you have no controls over wages you then just increase inequality....
People like you and belboid etc seem to think that better off people need the incentive of higher wages but what effect does that have on the rest of us....
What kind of effect on morale of lower paid workers is it to see people at the top of charities and public services earning ridiculously high amounts of money....

 

[kabbes]

There is a problem with the general idea of a maximum wage that goes like this:

In the private sector, my company employs me because they expect to make money out of my labour. If the fruits of my actions make them a LOT of money then it is EXTREMELY pro-company and anti-employee to limit the reward that I can be given for this.

Essentially, if I make the company £1m this year, why should I only see £50k of that whilst the company gets to keep £950k of it? How is that fair on the employee?

And that extra £950k doesn't just disappear. It becomes corporate profit, which means that it turns up in share dividends. So it is still income to people -- it's just that it has been concentrated into the hands of the shareholders instead of to labour that actually produced it. How does that help the poorly paid? Not to mention that it exacerbates the problens of the divide between those with pre-existing wealth and those without.

As long as companies make profits, it is just that an element of that is seen in employee reward -- that's a lot fairer than it all ending up with the shareholders.

 

[kabbes]

And to repeat an earlier message: the labour market doesn't exist in self-contained silos. You can't set public sector pay with complete disregard to private sector pay, because both sectors are competing for the same people.

 

[ymu]

There is a problem with the general idea of a maximum wage that goes like this:

In the private sector, my company employs me because they expect to make money out of my labour. If the fruits of my actions make them a LOT of money then it is EXTREMELY pro-company and anti-employee to limit the reward that I can be given for this.

Essentially, if I make the company £1m this year, why should I only see £50k of that whilst the company gets to keep £950k of it? How is that fair on the employee?

And that extra £950k doesn't just disappear. It becomes corporate profit, which means that it turns up in share dividends. So it is still income to people -- it's just that it has been concentrated into the hands of the shareholders instead of to labour that actually produced it. How does that help the poorly paid? Not to mention that it exacerbates the problens of the divide between those with pre-existing wealth and those without.

As long as companies make profits, it is just that an element of that is seen in employee reward -- that's a lot fairer than it all ending up with the shareholders.

If income is limited to ~£50k via a properly progressive income tax structure, the shareholders will just pay more tax on their unearned profits.

The difference is that your (and their) wages are not many many times higher than they would be for anyone else putting in a day's work to keep the company functioning.

As I said before, this isn't something you could just bolt onto the current system and expect it to work. It wouldn't. But income inequality is a huge problem - having a clear association with crime and violent crime, mental health, educational inequality, etc - and it's getting rapidly worse. It has to be tackled and the first barrier to overcome is this idea that £50k isn't "enough".

Why isn't it enough? Currently, £10k is considered "enough" for a fulltime worker on minimum wage. £22k is more than "enough" for half of us, £33k more than "enough" for 75%, £50k more than "enough" for 90%. A maximum income of £50k would allow a minimum income of £17k - much more civilised than the current situation. If £50k isn't "enough" for you, which groups of workers should get paid less so you can get paid more?

Sorting this out will obviously mean some short-term pain for high-earners who have maxed themselves out on debt and luxury living, but they would still have a rather decent living wage to fall back on. These sorts of structural adjustments happen all the time, we're just more accustomed to them affecting workers whose industries have been closed down and their town left to rot. They'll get over it, just like everyone else has to.

 

[kabbes]

I know it won't make me popular, so I have been hesitant to say it. But oh well, here it is: I wouldn't do my job for £50k. It's too stressful, the hours are too long, it required too many years of study and is too soul-crushing. Given the choice of doing this for £50k or teaching for £33k, I'd do teaching like a shot. The stress thing is the key part -- there are a lot of people relying on my decisions and there is a lot of money at stake, with a high chance of being sued for getting anything wrong.

Sorry for those that I have offended by this attitude.

 

[kabbes]

ymu, I have been thinking about what you said there about taxing the income on shareholders and there is a big, big problem.

Basically, nobody will take financial risk unless there is a corresponding reward to go with it. Nobody will ever invest in the risky high-tech/bio-tech start-up, for example, without the possibility that it makes them rich. If you cap out earnings at what is, to be honest, a really low level (relatively speaking to the millions that are currently possible) then there is simply no point in making these investments. So you can kiss goodbye to anything other than the really safe start-ups, which would really kill our innovation.

 

[likesfish]

so buy your rules if say somebody invents say an anti gravity car stay in the uk earn 50k
go to the USA earn squillions
why if you don't work hard study for a skill etc should the rest of us prop you up ?

 

[Spion]

Basically, nobody will take financial risk unless there is a corresponding reward to go with it. Nobody will ever invest in the risky high-tech/bio-tech start-up, for example, without the possibility that it makes them rich. If you cap out earnings at what is, to be honest, a really low level (relatively speaking to the millions that are currently possible) then there is simply no point in making these investments. So you can kiss goodbye to anything other than the really safe start-ups, which would really kill our innovation.

We need rid of this parasitic system where (supposedly) nothing good is done unless someone gets obscenely wealthy from it.

I say supposedly because the vast bulk of the hard work, endeavour and innovation in human history has not come from those who are in it for profit, and that could be the case generally if we freed the bulk of people from simply working to survive

 

[kabbes]

We need rid of this parasitic system where (supposedly) nothing good is done unless someone gets obscenely wealthy from it.

I don't necessarily have a problem with this. But it exists completely separately to anything like our current capitalist system. As long as the current system exists in anything like its current form, it will be the rules that everybody plays by. And hence just layering a maximum wage on top of it will simply not work.

I say supposedly because the vast bulk of the hard work, endeavour and innovation in human history has not come from those who are in it for profit, and that could be the case generally if we freed the bulk of people from simply working to survive

Although a lot of the innovation has indeed been performed by those not in it for profit, I would argue that this is not the case for a lot of the inspiration and persperation required to turn that innovation into a widespread usable product. Because that requires serious investment and investment requires the possibility of reward.

 

[Spion]

Although a lot of the innovation has indeed been performed by those not in it for profit, I would argue that this is not the case for a lot of the inspiration and persperation required to turn that innovation into a widespread usable product. Because that requires serious investment and investment requires the possibility of reward.

Of course we have little to compare the current system against, except perhaps examples of military procurement in wartime that have produced innovation and mass produced products which were not governed by profit only.

The vast bulk of humanity work very hard for very little. I believe if people were given the chance to innovate and perspire in the development and productisation of things they would, and without having to become millionaires as an incentive

 

[kabbes]

Well I think you may (or may not) be right -- I couldn't really say with no empirical evidence one way or the other. But that doesn't really address the system as it is, which is what I am talking about.

 

[tbaldwin]

We need rid of this parasitic system where (supposedly) nothing good is done unless someone gets obscenely wealthy from it.

I say supposedly because the vast bulk of the hard work, endeavour and innovation in human history has not come from those who are in it for profit, and that could be the case generally if we freed the bulk of people from simply working to survive

Good post Spion....
Which gets right to the heart of why people like belboid who think they are left wing are so so wrong.

 

[myname]

I know it won't make me popular, so I have been hesitant to say it. But oh well, here it is: I wouldn't do my job for £50k. It's too stressful, the hours are too long, it required too many years of study and is too soul-crushing. Given the choice of doing this for £50k or teaching for £33k, I'd do teaching like a shot. The stress thing is the key part -- there are a lot of people relying on my decisions and there is a lot of money at stake, with a high chance of being sued for getting anything wrong.

Sorry for those that I have offended by this attitude.

There's a lot of people who do stressful, soul crushing, long hours work for far less than 50k, and even less than 33k. And they do it because they don't necessarily have a choice of other better work or even better paid work. Fair enough that you wouldn't do your job for 50k, lucky you that you can choose to do it for more money. I'd like to be able to say I wouldn't do my job for the money I get, but I have to survive, and there isn't a line up of better paid jobs waiting for me.

 

[kabbes]

But there is a line up of jobs waiting for me if I didn't do this one. A long line. Jobs where you can walk away at the end of your 9-5 day and not give it another thought until the next day. Jobs where there isn't an ever-present threat of being sued or being hauled in front of a disciplinary committee. Jobs where you get a direct, human, tangible benefit from your day-to-day work. So why the hell would I do this one, given the choices available, if it didn't have the financial reward associated with it? Why would anybody? That's why they pay so much in the first place. You don't get the money just because your employer doesn't know what else to do with it.

But if nobody did these jobs then capitalism couldn't run. No finance, no pensions, no investments, no life insurance, no general insurance, no capital flow. Which means as long as the system exists, it needs people to do them and it needs to pay them accordingly.

Of course, if the system was completely different -- no money, for example -- then the jobs based on looking after the flow of money wouldn't be necessary, so none of it would matter. But that is a much more radical shift than merely introducing a maximum wage, which would kill the labour supply to the jobs without removing the need for the jobs.