Similarly, enemies of the market, motivated by altruistic premises, occasionally propose that legal caps should be placed on salaries. The proponents of such proposals, although often erroneously termed "idealists," are hobbled by a singularly narrow, concrete-bound view of human potential and of the world at large, a view which assumes that value comes only from backbreaking physical exertion (cf. pp. 4.4:35 ff.). They cannot fathom how one twenty-first century manager, equipped with a vision of a new operating system or software product and a genius for communicating that vision to a team of gifted professionals, could bring enormous direct or indirect benefits to hundreds of millions of people across the globe. The salary caps proposed by these reactionaries are a prescription for a severe and generalized shortage of talent, in which superior producers are driven underground or redirect their efforts to other purposes, and in which living standards of the many sink below third-world levels.

Usually included in discussions of maximum price controls are usury laws, which prohibit interest rates exceeding certain maximum levels; however, because money-lending is really the purchase of future money (cf. pp. 4.7:10-4), we shall regard such regulations as an instance of minimum price controls instead. Both analytical approaches yield the same practical conclusions.