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1:12 will it destroy swiss economy?
- Thread starter DC
- Start date
and maybe it actually is The Fallen Serpent
Master Poster
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2009
- Messages
- 2,139
Being an economically liberal minded person I am sympathetic to regulations such as this. On the face of it, the concept that there is a limit between how much more valuable one person's work is over another person's work speaks to my emotional sense of fairness that is often assaulted by examples where the more highly paid people do not meet my personal judgment of adding value.
However... I need to step back from my emotional reaction to this type of regulation and caution other like minded people to do the same. Wage inequalities are more a symptom of an issue than the cause. I find such statistics useful for analyzing the health of an economy but am extremely wary of mandating specific outcomes in this way. Market forces will not vanish by the stroke of the pen, they will just evolve to the new conditions. Anytime we veer from market manipulations that encourage certain outcomes to market manipulations that specify results regardless of circumstance we need to be extra careful. When I think about "Max income = (lowest income) x 12" as a regulation in a detached way, I suspect you would end up with unintended results comparable to a regulation that stated "Pi=3." Either it is ignored or unintended consequences will cause problems.
I am not completely closed to the idea, but find it unlikely I would be convinced the benefits outweigh the costs.
However... I need to step back from my emotional reaction to this type of regulation and caution other like minded people to do the same. Wage inequalities are more a symptom of an issue than the cause. I find such statistics useful for analyzing the health of an economy but am extremely wary of mandating specific outcomes in this way. Market forces will not vanish by the stroke of the pen, they will just evolve to the new conditions. Anytime we veer from market manipulations that encourage certain outcomes to market manipulations that specify results regardless of circumstance we need to be extra careful. When I think about "Max income = (lowest income) x 12" as a regulation in a detached way, I suspect you would end up with unintended results comparable to a regulation that stated "Pi=3." Either it is ignored or unintended consequences will cause problems.
I am not completely closed to the idea, but find it unlikely I would be convinced the benefits outweigh the costs.