> A few things: Addressing point 1, the commenter never said anything like that.

Sure, the commenter didn't think anyone was proposing getting rid of all remote work. He just went out of his way to say that we can't get rid of all remote work, because obvious things like that need to be stated on a thread about pay inequality.

> Addressing point 2, right now the US economy imperfectly applies wages to an individual worker based on the demand for their skills. If their skills become more scarce or they develop better skills their wages should increase. If we say pay them more without changing the demand or the skills they have who will pay them more? Where will the money come from?

Pay at the top.

> The simple answer might be to pay the CEO less but their value is also set on Market rates for their skills and demand, so if a chain paid the CEO less they would leave and go somewhere were they got paid more.

Then let them go.

If all the benefits of the CEOs innovation just go to the CEO, then why should anyone else care if the CEO innovates? And it's not just the benefits of the CEO's innovation that go to the CEO, it's the benefits of the innovation of everyone at the company. You seem convinced that CEOs provide more value to the economy than they suck out of the economy, but this is not at all evident.

> Then that chain would have to higher someone else for more than the reduced rate of the previous CEO.

I'm not sure why you think they would have to pay more.

A lot of this handwaving fear about how we have to pay CEOs or we'll lose them, is to prevent a free market which agrees what a CEO is worth from deciding a lower value. But if everyone realizes that people amassing un-spendably large hordes of wealth is not actually a net benefit to society, then the free market is quite capable of pegging the value of a CEO much lower than it currently is.

This is particularly true in the US: we can peg the pay of CEOs significantly lower than they are, while still paying CEOs more than any other nation in the world. Of the Forbes 11 richest people in the world, 9 are in the US.

Pegging the pay of top earners within a company to bottom earners in the company means that CEOs always still have incentive to grow their companies, because they get paid more if they do.

> I also like the idea of paying people at the bottom of the economy more, but the government shouldn't just mandate some people make more and other people make less. We must find a way to either change the skill level or demand for those employees.

This won't help low-income workers. As long as we allow some people to determine their own pay with complete impunity, they'll always decide to pay themselves and not others whenever possible. That's what the incentives cause them to do.

> Artificially changing demand for low skilled employees is a bit scary because it incentivizes investments in automation.

I don't see a benefit in work for the sake of work. If a machine can do something as well as a human, a machine should do it. I don't want to see a future where we keep people doing work that machines could do. I'd rather see a world where machines do all the work, and everyone benefits from that work.

A future where machines do all the work is only scary if you only allow economic models which prevent everyone from benefiting from automation.