The idea that everyone deserves a living wage from their employer has its heart in the right place but is wrong-headed. The reason is twofold: employers will attempt not to pay a living wage anyway, and it ignores the unemployed
The better goal is to say that everyone deserves an income sufficient to make it possible to buy the things they need in life, even if they aren't employed. The best way to do this is with a robust welfare state, or a UBI. If you could survive just fine in perpetuity without a job, many people would choose to stay home and play videogames unless the jobs available to them made it truly worth their while.
These ideas are problematic in so many different directions that without hearing which version of it is being proposed, it's a little hard to argue.
I mean generally speaking, through which mechanism are you proposing telling people that they no longer have the right to make more money, even though people want to buy goods and services from them. Is it a hard cap? Some kind of ratio (which will surely be gamed to hell), is it case by case? Who sets the cap or ratio? Who is the minister of punishing rich people who decides that 5 billion isn't really a problem but 40 billion is just where to draw the line. Or is it because some guy bought a boat that was just a little too ostentatious (maybe he can send it back to the boat yard to have it trimmed up by 10 meters and evade the ruling). Do you see where this gets silly and is ripe for abuse?
Let's say you miraculously manage to pull this off, then you'd have to wait the entire 10 minutes until Bezos Zuck and Buffett, shift half of their stock into a trust owned by family members that amazingly keeps them all just under the cap for long enough for them to do the same to redistribute to their heirs. Like, do you thing those guys are just going to call it quits because of this? They have all the money they need. Zuck probably doesn't wake up in the morning motivated by making another billion. He's playing a different meta-game.
Also, it's very hard for me to imagine a version of the process for implementing this that does not look like some political theater McCarthy hearingesque which-hunt.
Finally, whether you are reasonable or not, I know many people who would love to set these caps at absurd points. The coworking space I work at has the local chapter of Maoists who meet up every week on Wednesdays. I doubt you'd make it to six figures before they set their line. Do you really want this to be up to a vote?.
Meanwhile amazon payed negative corporate taxes if I recall correctly a few years ago, and has cities fighting hand over fist to optionally hand tax payer money back to them in lump sums as bribes to get HQ2. We have all sorts of other regressive taxes. Our whole tax code is designed to benefit huge corporations who can hire millions of dollars worth of lawyers to find loopholes at the expense of being totally unmanageable to small business owners who cover the difference. So yes, our system has a lot of problems and a lot of them aren't as emotionally gratifying as complaining about some rich guys 3rd helicopter, but many of them, if people took the time to learn about them could actually meaningfully changed these situations going forward as opposed to punishing a handful of people who profited off of the current backwards system.
