'Eye-popping' Indeed

Via Kiwiblog, I see that the ever-astute John Minto has recycled the old idea of a salary cap of 10x the minimum wage.

I am sure that all my readers are familiar with standard discussions of price ceilings (as would any high school economics student be), so I won't rehash them here, except to note that that would probably halve the incomes of most of our senior doctors (or close to it) - presumably they are also the disgusting corporate types Minto despises so much. Obviously being a perennially-incensed pundit is far more noble and civic-minded.

The more interesting point (to me) whenever someone proposes something like this is how they intuitively decide what's too much. Very few people suggest salary caps that would ever be likely to affect them. John Minto's proposed salary cap is just enough to be comfortably above what a journalist and/or author could reasonably expect to earn at the peak of his/her career in New Zealand (including speaking fees, etc). I suspect that this is not a coincidence.