No kidding, people seem to pretend supply and demand don't exist and they can just ignore market forces. This sort of populist first order thinking sounds good

No kidding, people seem to pretend supply and demand don't exist and they can just ignore market forces. This sort of populist first order thinking sounds good if you don't think about it very hard, but never actually works. They'll either waste money overpaying people (and go out of business or simply operate a charity if they have deep pockets) or underpaying and fail to attract competitive talent. Presumably it's all just for show anyway, whatever happens will be even less fair than if they just paid market wages for the work they wanted done