There are smart people that want to earn more than a "social good" paycheck, whatever amount you peg that at.

That's the issue with your "social good" approach, is that by capping the upside, you're capping the control one can exercise over their own livelihoods.

The smart scientist wanted to send their kid to a more expensive Montessori preschool instead of a neighborhood preschool? Too bad. You are capped at the socially accepted able salary range.

No matter how much extra work, training, contributions, the smart person would inject into their career, they are forever capped at the socially good rate.

No one’s talking about pegging the salaries of the researchers who are in a completely different class than executive management. It’s a Straw Man argument.

The disdain for execs is apparent.

Most engineers can’t scale companies. Just take a look at the wasteland of personal projects demo’ed on HN. Great technical execution, but they don’t get off the ground as a profit generating company.

And a company scaled to to billions of dollars is even more of an outlier. It’s absolutely a skill.

Notice that I didn’t say anywhere that executives shouldn’t be paid more than workers. It’s a question of how much more. Right now executives make over 200 times more than an average worker, at a rate that’s increased more rapidly than workers wages. You can find a lot of economists who think this actually isn’t that great for the economy.

And yes, you can have a conversation of what value an exec brings vs the value generated by scientists inventing the products their selling. But the original point was that no one is coming after workers salaries — they’re not the ones making $15m a year.

That seems to suggest that somehow everyone's earnings is unlimited assuming they do extra work and train in whatever vocation they want, when we all know that isn't the case. Why is it that the markets cap is more virtuous than one that's good for society?

It actually is the case. Trick is that it's strongly modulated by randomness (luck).

There are no billionaire janitors, drycleaners, or chefs. I don't think there are even any billionaire software developers, doctors, or lawyers. There ARE billionaire business owners of all those things, but for the vocations themselves, it doesn't matter how good at that particular thing you are, you can't earn unlimited wealth strictly off those vocation specific skills and hard work unless you pivot and move your time and effort into something else.

> Or you know, we can determine that the cost of keeping people healthy is a social good and invest in that.

Social goods that we ostensibly invest in, often are crappy career paths in terms of pay. If you don't believe me, talk with a teacher. We know that few things contribute to the social good as much as a good education, but tell me honestly. If you knew a poor, smart, hard working kid, what career path would you suggest, teacher or software developer?

> what career path would you suggest, teacher or software developer?

Depends on what they like to do. There is a lot we can change so that people can do what they love without punishing careers that aren't directly tied to profit.

Or maybe extreme, frontier-inspired individualism went obsolete once the West was Won?

I’m all for smart people being paid well to work hard. But there has to be a better model. Perhaps something similar to the massive payouts we see lawyers getting in class action suits, except instead of law firms and defendants we have drug researchers and illnesses.

I mean, so you pay teachers more. Government jobs weren’t always vilified, nor heavily underfunded. The shift happened with Milton Friedman in the 60s and 70s.

A teacher can be a software developer as well.

If the free market doesn’t determine what diseases are targeted, then it’s just some govt official doing it. Which, undoubtedly, will succumb to political games.

There aren’t enough resources out there to tackle every disease.

The free market itself is the result of some govt officials' design, and plenty of polical games.

"Free market" isn't really the right term for this method of price discovery when life and limb is on the line. "Highway robbery" might be more appropriate.

I mean, sure, but if you turn on the TV the ads are for erectile disfunction drugs — that’s where the money is. When it comes to funding a vaccine that needs to go out to a few billion people who can’t afford it, I’d put my lot in with the government.