Knowing the incredible amount of stress my CEO is under and the amount of criticism he receives, I do not begrudge him his salary. No matter what decision you make, even if you're God and your decision is perfect, some loudmouth is going to be unhappy about it and try to make your life miserable while trying to turn everyone who is willing to listen to them against you. Or some low-level employee is going to think they know how to do your job better than you do, or not realize the risks that you are managing, and complain.
No, I wouldn't want to become a CEO of a large company, even if someone paid me $20M a year.
Maximum wage does not work, if maximum wage refers to putting a cap on compensation. They do that to doctors in Canada now, and I suspect that's contributing to the brain drain to the US where doctors can make more money.
I charge a premium for my services in China, because I'm literally better trained and more effective than most others in my role - the results speak for themselves. If someone put a cap on my wage, I'd simply move somewhere where I can charge what I'm worth. Putting a cap on compensation leads to all the really good people leaving.
Conversely, my aunt was until very recently the president of a multinational corporation with an annual 300M+ revenue. She probably had the least stressful job in the company because she could outsource most of the stress to the management below her.
Her job was to be the final say on the solutions that other people had to come up with. She finished work every single weekday at 4pm, and didn't even have a work cell phone. It was someone else's job to deal with emergencies and then report to her the next day.
She made obscene amounts of money to generally *not* stress about anything.
In most company structures I've seen, it's the junior executives and middle managers who experience the most stress.
But I also have never lived and worked in China, which is a different cultural and economic creature for sure.
ETA: there are also many extremely demanding careers with general ceilings on their earning potential and it has never caused anyone who not pursue these careers.
I have had many, many talks where I explain to doctors, dentists, and lawyers that relative to their effort, risk, and skill that they're horribly underpaid.
Even though virtually any doctor, dentist, or lawyer could be orders of magnitude richer had they dedicated that amount of effort into a different, more scalable profession, it doesn't deter anyone from working their asses off to achieve in those extraordinarily stressful and demanding roles.
So I'm not convinced that throttling top level earning potential would actually hold people back from working their asses off to accomplish great career success.
A hell of a lot of people would work themselves to the bone and take massive risks to make even low 7 figures.
