Earlier quoted context omitted.
A max wage is insane government overreach. If I want to make a deal with someone else where I’ll work to do something and in return they pay me a portion of the surplus value I create, there is no justification, moral or economic, to cap that amount. Moreover, price ceilings have a rich and long empirical and theoretical argument against their existence in the economics literature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pric…
Cases like the Manhattan project team are rare. Cases like grossly overpaid managers and executives in FIRE industries are common.
...Of course, we can actually be even more clever than this, if we want, and imagine models where we are both right (of course they might not be true).
For example, we might say the value provided by a manager is, on average, $1,000,000. However, this is driven mostly by the top 10 percentile who are worth $10,000,00 a year, whereas the median is actually slightly overpaid. We can justify this distribution by adding uncertainty on the signal. A more thoughtful model of this quick example exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar...
So the next question would be: What is more likely? That people are overpaid, obviously, and the government needs to stop it? Or the market is behaving optimally under complex uncertainty, and the government, being no better at interpreting signal than these firms themselves, is likely just to make things more complicated and screwed up by entering? (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, but if you want to solve it formally follow the journal articles in the link I shared above).