Maybe we are finally headed toward true Marxism with the Democrats. Their vice chair wants to cap wages, presumably by taxing the bejeezus out of anyone who exceeds his threshold.

Keith Ellison was interviewed earlier this month by Sarah Jaffe, an independent journalist who published the interview in The Progressive Wednesday. She apparently caught up with Ellison after he had been speaking at a Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting in Baltimore. He mentioned something about a maximum wage. She thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

Jaffe: you made a joke about a maximum wage. Ellison: Wait a minute. I did not make a joke about maximum wage. I made a statement about maximum wage. What I’m saying is, if you were to make more than 20 times more than the people who actually make the products and do the services of your company, then we’re going to tax you more. We’re going to tax you at all — we’re going to tax you. You’re going to be ineligible for certain programming. Or, we could even do something like say, look, if you wanna pay yourself more than 20 times your average worker, that’s fine, but if you give the workers an increase as you get them, then maybe we’ll think about that in terms of some sort of a policy benefit. But this idea that you can leave people in poverty as you are stacking up dead presidents like nobody’s business has got to come to an end. I mean the CEO of McDonald’s makes $3000 an hour and they’re fighting people getting $15 an hour . . . Where did you get that greedy? And how did you create a philosophy that says [it’s right] to protect your greed, so that if I say you shouldn’t be that greedy, you get to call me a name? Because they do . . . If we say your incalculable greed is not acceptable, we get called communists. Why not call them what they are, which is avaricious and greedy?

So let’s see. According to a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO at America’s largest firms made about $15.6 million, 271 times the average worker’s pay of about $57,500. Under Eillson’s proposal, you would slash their pay to about $1.15 million, or by more than $14 million.

Now, I don’t like that pay gap either. But CEOs are not receiving charitable contributions. They are paid what they are because somebody thinks they are worth it, that they make the decisions that earn profits and provide jobs. Cut CEO pay by an amount like that, they will go so something else, and you will have a lot of crappy companies and a lot of lost jobs. And you will have a system that says you shouldn’t make what the market says you are worth, you should make what Keith Ellison thinks you are worth.