Although it is also worth reminding people that when there was an explicit thread on this subject a couple months ago (asking those in countries with single-payer systems how they felt about it), I believe that the large majority of them expressed a preference for their system over the kind of system that we have!
I think if they just had to post the wages of the upper-ups it would keep them from getting so greedy.
In the military, you can tell what everyone makes to the penny, because the wages and grades and levels are all posted.
P.S.—If anyone can figure out how to search for threads more than 30 days back, maybe you can dig up the link to the one I refer to. It is probably from like the November time frame and I assume its title had either the world “health” or “medicine” in it.
I’m sure the large majority of them also never required a hip replacement.
It’s a major fallacy to suggest that no health care is better than poor health care. As for the UK, Margaret Thatcher gutted the original program, a conservative. Canada still has a nice system (although Rush Limbaugh was paid dearly to falsely demonize it and our health-care champion, Hillary you-know-who). Recently, GW Bush was caught demonizing medicare by calling it a “giant HMO” while he was attempting to replace medicare with HMO’s (he then had the nerve to ask rhetorically if people thought medicare was a federal program or something). It never stops because it is expensive.
Right now in America we waste most of our health resources on the elderly, because they actually vote (good for them) and know what’s going on. As a trade-off, we neglect preventive programs for those that will actually repay their saved health through paying taxes. If everyone had access to preventive screenings, blood tests, check-ups, monitoring, etc, this is not a crunch on doctors, but techies and nurses, which can be trained must cheaper and faster. Also, as of now, the US government pays 41% of all health care, unevenly of course. If that were to be a base of 50% for everyone (not eliminating private insurance), then they could better control prices for older medications and standard procedures. The economic model that US health care is based on is the luxury model, not a utility model. It is a careless luxury to take good care of 100 year olds while babies go without doctors.
Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am happiest in a very urban environment, and that this is worth sacrificing a bit for. Also, I’ve always been a bit of an anglophile (and it was the British that pretty much invented capitalsim), and I believe that China will be capitalist in all but name within 20 years. I would prefer the days of British rule in Hong Kong, but since that’s impossible, I’ll just have to hope for the commies to allow the status quo there to remain. Even if fully libertarian, New Zealand is not what I’m looking for in a place to live. Plus they talk funny.
While I don’t completely agree with Mercutio, I am in favor of maximum wages for certain professions. For example, professional athlete’s are limited to making $99,999 per year, doesn’t matter the sport. Actors can only be paid a maximum of $30,000 per film. Lawyers should be forced to pay the rest of society for choosing that profession, along with politicians.
But if we do this, I think we should also institute a minimum wage for the more important professions. Let’s make sure that teachers get paid at least $100,000 per year. They are the ones who will help determine where the human species goes in the future. If our teachers aren’t the best available, neither will our future engineers and doctors.
Health care is most certainly not a “human right” recognized by Canada. There is no such right here.
Canada has a health care system, but it’s not a “right,” just as getting PBS isn’t a right in the USA even though they get government funding. The Canadian government could abolish the medicare system with the stroke of a pen, and nobody would be losing any rights.
ON THE OP:
Good Lord, of course not. People should be paid what they’re worth, and that will be nicely determined by the free market.
I think that it is important to point out that what Mercutio proposed is not a maximum wage, it is a maximum salar. Not that I’d support either, but the idea of a maximum salary seems especially ridiculous to me, since it will essentially punish people that decide to put in extra hours.
nowalls99 wrote
I can’t tell whether you’re making a funny joke or an extremely naive statement. I’m going to assume the former. bwahhhaha ha.
Not that I don’t agree that teachers, doctors, scientists, and such are very important for the future, but without sound politics and sound politicians you won’t find much support in this area. Ditto with lawyers. Have you seen the amount of laws there are now?
In every occupation there are two driving forces: desire to do the work in itself and the profit incentive. Some people find the former more important than the latter, and some neglect the former entirely and choose that latter.
What you propose is to tell the public at large what jobs are important and you’ll have a hard time doing that. ALL jobs are important, and almost equally so: they are important to the people who work in that area! A minimum wage is semi-intolerable to me, but a maximum wage is even worse. Maxmimum wages work against profit incentive. It also creats a very cutthroat job market since salaries can only go so high the very qualified will get everything the company can offer while the less qualified but still ok will get considerably more shafted.
A salary cap on individuals would allow the corporation to achieve a level of control that makes even a hard-core capitalist like myself quiver in fear. If we then set maximum profits for businesses as well then look out, America as an economic power is a pipe dream.
As well, if it is more than a salary cap and instead is a 100% tax rate after a certain income then we’ve handed all our money over to the government. Food lines, anyone? 
No pushing, Comrade.
I usually refrain from personal attacks, but in this case, I feel it is necessary. This has to be the most ignorant, ultra-liberal, poorly thought out, economically infeasable plan I have ever heard. As a matter of fact, you (and perhaps your offspring) should be forbidden from participating in ANY capitalist economy for the remainder of your lives.
Lets look at some of your examples:
Well, who deserves $100,000 salary more? Some teacher in Jerkwater Creek, MN teching social studies to a bunch of burn-outs or the Jack Welches, Lee Iacoccas, and Bill Gates who create companies that create $BILLIONS of wealth for hundreds of thousands of employees, supliers, distributors. Not to mention the millions who benefit from their products.
You dont need money to decriminalize drugs. Besides what’s the benefit of disrupting the entire global economic system so some wasteoid looser can sit around in his hemp pants, smoke pot and watch TV all day while the rest of us work for a living.
WTF?!?!?? Thats brilliant. Build 10,000 windmills to power a single can-opener. Solar and wind power are not efficient or economical (it takes energy to build the equipment with little or no return), thats why they are not in widespread use.
Well, everyone wants a nice house and a nice car. Problem is, there aren’t enough to go around. So, now you have a lot of $500,000 houses (fairly common in the Northeast) but not too many people who can afford them. You can institute rent control now to make them more affordable. Problem is, no one wants to build more nice houses because they wont get a good return on their investment. So now we end up with cities full of shanty-houses and low-budget apartments. Just like Eastern Europe
And finally
It may not be Communist, but it definitely is socialism. By the way, everyone in those countries may get health care, but the quality sucks compared to the US.
As long as other people must use their time and resources to provide a product or service (whether its health care, housing, BMWs, widgets, or anything else), they should be compensated at whatever price the market is willing to give them.
What I don’t understand about universal healthcare proponents is why, if healthcare is a human right, they would focus on this while food, shelter and clothing arte not yet universally guaranteed. I mean to say, shouldn’t we have free food housing and clothing before we worry about healthcare?
But as for the max salary: The biggest concern I can see would be the decrease in innovation, investment and inventions. Once I make $100k, why bother investing in new businesses or products? I know I wouldn’t bother working on my new invention, or getting my MBA or investing if there was no upside.
I also wonder how one would attract a rare talent. For example, sya that there are only 3 people in the world who can do a certain task and 100 companies are competing for them. One imagines that if salary were capped, the only option would be to offer that pay for a decreasing amount of work.
Whilst agreeing with mssmith537 that the the OP is poorly argued and based on strange premises, and additionally is ‘ultra-liberal’, I cannot let him/her get away with the typical US introspection over the health services of other advanced countries. Although the US spends more on health care than any other country, quality outcomes (infant mortality, adult mortality, morbidity indices)are worse than many (in fact most) public health systems in Western Europe and Australasia whether based on tax funded or compulsory insurance funded systems. Admitedly, the best of US health provision is as good or better than other states, but it is also possible to take out such private insurance in addition if that is what you want to do; only a minority choose to do this which may indicate the adequacy of the systems. Having observed the medical system available to poorer people on the Mexican border area of the richest US State, I can only say that it approached third world standards, and that was in the sixties, and it has deteriorated since.
I suppose one argument would be that food companies don’t refuse to provide food based on “pre-existing conditions”. Not that I agree with that argument.
What makes America one of the most powerful countries in the world is our capitalistic greed and the freedom and incentive to excel and rise to greatness in any field of endeavor.
When salary caps are instituted, you remove a major incentive. With a cap, one can only rise to a certain level, and once there, the need to excel disappears.
If we had no need to compete and excel, people and companies would cease to be be inventive and enterprising. This Land of Opportunity would become the Land of Mediocrity.
If you set a Maximum Wage, then you set limits on just about everything else. To me, this idea removes the “free” from “freedom”… and leaves it just plain dumb.
but food companies do discriminate. They wont sell their food for less than it cost to produce just as insurance carriers wont write your policy for less than they are going to pay out.
Of course, he h government could pass laws to force them to sell a policy for less than what will be paid out. And they could force Kraft to price cheese based on the means of the customer. But either way the cost is simply being redistributed. IMHO, socialism.
And I can only say, “So?” We well agree that one’s right of speech ends at another’s freedom from slander, so why doesn’t one’s “right” to health care end at another’s right to keep what they earn? What makes one think that they deserve health care?
I fondly remember the following discussion between a pretty young british girl and myself that went along these lines:
Her: “You mean you have to pay every time you go to the doctor?”
Me: “You mean you have to pay everytime someone else goes to the doctor?”
The conversation generally ended there.
Mr Z: “{B}ut food companies do discriminate. They wont sell their food for less than it cost to produce…”
You are, of course, referring to the group of farmers who miraculously don’t fall under the Department of Agriculture and don’t receive government subsidies to help price-fixing?
However, I really like your point about food/healthcare. HAHA, made me laugh–so true! I’m gonna remember that one next time I get into a discussion about it, credit to you of course! 
Also, in my previous post I typo-ed and made it seem like I said doctors and teachers and such were not important…rather, I meant to say that I agreed they were. Oops!
Just want to throw this in:
There’s two ways to ration demand for a product or service:
1 - Price.
2 - Supply.
The second becomes obvious when the first is controlled. Thus, communist countries were notorious for their long lines for even basic things because having controlled the first, they didn’t have enough to go around and subjected themselves to long lines.
The same thing can be seen in market economies when you see controlled prices: rent control in NYC limits the supply of apartments, so that NYC abounds in stories of people doing all kinds of things to get their hands on an apartment. Or, tolls on bridges and tunnels and highways: if those tolls were set privately, instead of by government authorities, you would see the price skyrocket during rush hours, decreasing demand by the use of either carpooling or mass transit.
But, in my mind, the interests of the person trying to sell you the food and the one trying to buy the food are pretty well aligned. The buyer wants to have yummy food that will make him happy, and the seller wants to provide yummy food that will keep the buyer coming back for more. Admittedly, the buyer wants to pay as little as possible and the seller wants to charge as much as possible. But, markets are good at determining the equilibrium point for things like that.
The problem with the health insurance market is that the interests aren’t very well aligned. The companies want to insure only healthy people and yet those who most want health insurance are those most likely to incur high costs. Admittedly that is true for other kinds of insurance too. But, for say car insurance, your being a bad risk is more under your control than for health. Also, a person having good health is a more fundamental thing than having a good (or any) car, which is why some of us like to think of some decent level of health care as a right.
Having said all that, I will also note that we do consider “food” to be a right to the extent that there are government programs (and private charities) in place to prevent people from starving to death on the streets.