Interesting Links for 11-01-2017

[andrewducker]

On Maximum Wages and Inequality (tags: wages inequality economics income ) Do any other nations enjoy understatement as much as the British do? (tags: uk language society funny ) This pretty-much sums up my position on philosophy and meaning (tags: philosophy life ) A lot of well-meaning people don’t understand single-payer healthcare (tags:

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

On the subject of maximum wages or maximum incomes I think another difficulty is around extra-terratoriality and unearned income and perhaps enforcement more generally.

It's easier to enforce a maximum *wage* where the payor and the payee are both in the same country. If you largely have to be present in the same jurisdiction to either provide the service or receive it then both parties are subject to the same laws and there is a clearer trail from provision of service to payment.

Where the income is the result of ownership of assets it can be murkier. If I own lots of shares in a company and receive dividend income I could convert that ownership in to the ownership of a foreign domiciled holding company which recieves dividends from Britain in say, The People's Democratic Republic of Nothern Efes, and then uses those dividends to pay me, in to my Efesian bank account a bunch of money.

I might or might not be domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. The holding company might be owned by me or be a pension vehicle for all the teachers in Nothern Efes. The holding company might be genuinely employing my infant son for his photogenic qualities at a salary just below the maximum wage or income level or it might be a dodge to get round the maximum income rules which are harder to see and control across borders.

I think it's harder to draft and then enforce a law which controls flows of money before they are distributed to individuals.

Fundamentally the job of controlling incomes becomes difficult, or you have to have international agreement and co-operation or you have to be important enough and prepared to use extra-terratorial rules to control what people do in foreign countries.

It's one of my sadnesses about Brexit. I think if you want to control elites who can move around from jurisdiction to jurisdiction then you need co-ordinated democratic action across the widest possible set of jurisdictions. That's probably easier if the jurisdictions share some form of legal and political framework.

[andrewducker]

Yup. International cooperation is definitely the way to go to tackle this stuff. And I agree that the rich will simply find ways around caps, particularly if they're working for international companies.