Apparently the Australian Christion Lobby supports wage caps:
... Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby says the churches want equality in wealth.
"There is no way that you can justify this degree of difference between senior executives' pay and workers' pay," he said.
"Certainly I think that the church needs to speak out. This is a matter that greatly effects the nature of our society."
So as an Australian Christian I've sent them an email expressing my views on this issue:
Hi,
I've noticed that you've come out at least partly in support of government restricting wages for higher paid worker: http://www.acl.org.au/national/browse.stw?article_id=29217 (it's possible that the ABC has misrepresented the ACL's views on this of course, in which case I recommend posting a clarification). I oppose this quite strongly and feel that I should explain why.
There are three problems with supporting this:
1. It's impractical. It won't work in the majority of cases for two reasons: the first is that there will be loopholes, which a smart accountant will be able to get the through, and the second is that we are talking about people dropping from 10-20Mil to 5Mil; these are people who can easily move overseas to countries that don't have such laws, meaning that Australian companies would lose access to a large number of the most highly sought-after executives, harming the Australian economy, potentially quite seriously.
2. Supporting this plan is liable to drive people away from the Church. People get angry when the Church is seen as "interfering" with the government, and this would be seen as the Church interfering with the government by many.
3. There is no Biblical or Moral defense of such a stance that I'm aware of. Truly neither of the others is a good enough reason for the Church to ignore a strong moral issue like say Abortion, but this isn't a moral issue. The nearest thing I'm aware of in the Bible is the rich young ruler who Jesus told to give his money to the poor, but the thing is that Jesus told him to give his OWN money to the poor, not to raise taxes and give that money to the poor, and definitely not to set some maximum "fair" wage for anyone in the area he was the ruler over.
I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on why the Christian church needs to support this proposal.
PS. I'll be posting the text of this email on my own website (http://blog.timp.com.au) as well, and would appreciate being able to post your response there as well.
--
TimP
[http://blog.timp.com.au]
